Hastings, Fishing, 1929 (oil on canvas)

Not every artist that attended the Slade became a modernist, and Nicholls used to say that it took him years to unlearn what he had been taught there. He made a careful study instead of the methods of Reynolds and Richard Wilson, developing a distinctive brown palette with an antique finish, and lived in Sussex painting quiet, tonal landscapes. There was an exhibition of the Ford Collection in Brighton Art Gallery in 1920, when Nicholls was living in nearby Steyning, and he spent days in there studying the Wilsons. He was President of the Royal Society of British Artists 1931-47.