Sous l'arche du pont (Under the Arch of the Bridge)

As a printmaker, William Nicholson made his name in woodcuts. Under the Arch of the Bridge was the first of his few lithographs. Nicholson probably saw this barge horse along the canal towpath in the village of Denham, Buckinghamshire, England, where he lived in 1894. His restraint here bears out the artist James McNeill Whistler’s comment that Nicholson understood the “art of leaving out.”