Shortly after his wife died in the Spanish influenza outbreak of 1918, William Nicholson married Edith Stuart-Wortley and moved to the Old Manor House in the village of Sutton Veny in Wiltshire, where he continued working throughout the 1920s. By this point, Nicholson was a good friend of Lady Frances Horner (1854–1940) and had completed a series of views of Mells and its environs which she reproduced in her memoir, Time Remembered (1933).¹ The present landscape features Cley Hill, Wiltshire, the site of an Iron Age hillfort, which lies on the edge of Salisbury Plain, about eight miles south-east of Mells.

 Raymond Asquith recalls: ‘The small sketch of the Wiltshire Downs was later given by Frances Horner, or perhaps by Katharine Asquith, to Katharine’s 2nd daughter Perdita Jolliffe/Hylton. Perdita (my aunt) very kindly gave it to me when I went to university aged 18 (1970), and it has been with me ever since, wherever I have lived, including Moscow & Kiev, returning to the Manor when we moved there in 2012. It now hangs in the Oak Room Passage, near the Oak Room itself’.²