Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/23

 the 'Journal of Botany' he contributed notes on such segregates as those of Rosa and of Cardamine pratensis. The 'Wild Fauna and Flora of Kew Gardens,' issued in the 'Kew Bulletin' in 1906, which expanded his paper of 1875, was largely his work. Out of 2000 fungi enumerated, 500 were found by Nicholson. His herbarium of British plants was presented, towards the close of his life, to the University of Aberdeen, through his friend James Trail, professor of botany there.

When Sir [q. v. Suppl. II] was reorganising and extending the arboretum at Kew, he found an able coadjutor in Nicholson, who wrote monographs on the genera Acer and Quercus and twenty articles on the Kew Arboretum in the 'Gardeners' Chronicle,' during 1881-3. A valuable herbarium which he formed of trees and shrubs was purchased by the trustees of the Bentham fund in 1889 and presented to Kew. His 'Hand-list of Trees and Shrubs grown at Kew' (anon. 2 pts. 1894-6) attested the fulness of his knowledge of this class of plants. Nicholson's magnum opus was 'The Dictionary of Gardening' (4 vols. 1885-9; enlarged edit. in French, by his friend M. Mottet, 1892-9; two supplementary vols, to the English edition, 1900-1). This standard work of reference, most of which was not only edited but written by Nicholson, did for the extended horticulture of the nineteenth century what Philip Miller's Dictionary did for that of the eighteenth.

Of gentle, unselfish character, he was chosen first president on the foundation of the Kew Guild in 1894. Elected an associate of the Linnean Society in 1886, Nicholson became a fellow in 1898, and he was awarded the Veitchian medal of the Royal Horticultural Society in 1894, and the Victoria medal in 1897. To him was dedicated in 1895 the 48th volume of the 'Garden,' a paper to which he was a large contributor. Dr. Udo Dammer in 1901 named a Central American palm Neonicholsonia Georgei. Fond of athletic exercises, he brought on, by his devotion to mountaineering, heart trouble, of which he died at Richmond, on 20 Sept. 1908. His remains were cremated. He married in 1875 Elizabeth Naylor Bell; but she died soon after, leaving a son, James Bell Nicholson, now a lieutenant in the navy.

 NICOL, ERSKINE (1825–1904), painter, born in Leith on 3 July 1825, was eldest son (in a family of five sons and one daughter) of James Main Nicol of that city by his wife Margaret Alexander. After a brief commercial education he became a house-painter, but quickly turned to art. He was an unusually youthful student at the Trustees' Academy, Edinburgh, where he came under the joint instruction of Sir [q. v.] and [q. v.]. At fifteen he exhibited a landscape at the Royal Scottish Academy, and two years later two (one painted in England) and a chalk portrait. For a time he filled the post of drawing-master in Leith Academy.

After a hard struggle at Leith to earn a living by his pencil, he went to Dublin in 1846, and for the next four or five years taught privately there, and not, as is frequently said, under the Science and Art Department. At Dublin he discovered the humours of Irish peasant life, the unvarying subject for his brush for a quarter of a century. From Ireland, where he had a patron in his friend Mr. Armstrong of Rathmines, he sent two examples of this kind to the Scottish Academy exhibitions of 1849-50. In 1850 he settled in Edinburgh, where his reputation was already established. Most of the work he exhibited at the R.S.A. was purchased by well-known collectors like Mr. John Miller of Liverpool and Mr. John Tennant of Glasgow. He was elected an associate of the Scottish Academy in 1851 and a full member in 1859. His diploma work for the Scottish Academy, 'The Day after the Fair,' is in the National Gallery, Edinburgh.

In 1862 Nicol left Edinburgh for London, at first renting a studio in St. John's Wood, and from 1864 till the end of his painting career residing at 24 Dawson Place, Pembridge Square, W. Though he finished his canvases in Edinburgh or London, Nicol for several months of each year studied his Irish subjects at first hand in Co. Westmeath, where he built himself a studio at Clonave, Deravaragh. When his health no longer permitted the journey to Ireland, he abandoned Irish humble life for that of Scotland, which he studied at Pitlochry, where he fitted up a disused church as a studio.

Nicol contributed to the Royal Academy first in 1851, and then in 1857-8; from 1861 to 1879, there was only a break in 1870. Elected an associate in 1866, he joined the retired list after an acute illness in 1885. His portrait of Dr. George Skene Keith, which was exhibited at the R.A.