Ben

Above is Ben Nicholson's Auberge de la Sole Dieppoise, one of my favourites among his paintings, many of which leave me fairly cool. Ben, born on this day in 1894, took off in a wholly different direction from his father, the great (and still underrated) William Nicholson, pursuing abstraction rather than naturalism, and thereby becoming a fashionable and widely celebrated artist, even being enrolled in the Order of Merit, which his father never was. 
  When young Ben was studying at the Slade – along with Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, etc. – he spent much of his time playing billiards. He claimed that the abstract formality of the green baize and the ever changing relationships between the coloured balls stimulated his aesthetic sense. Well, maybe they did...
   The picture above, which is in the Tate collection, mixes abstraction with naturalism, showing the reflections in the window of a Dieppe restaurant – including the face of his then wife, Barbara Hepworth (who bore him triplets as well as a son). The restaurant is long gone, alas, and is now an estate agent's office.