John Watson was trained under John Pettie RA and presumably also in part by his father, painting historical genre subjects in a rather more polished style than the latter, but often with a similar humorous cast. In 1876 he first exhibited at the RA from his father’s house, 24 Dawson Place, Notting Hill Gate, and on 3rd August that year at St Mary Abbott’s, Kensington, married Charlotte Ellen Cope, daughter of the well-known painter Charles West Cope, RA. They also settled in Kensington, first at 144 Finborough Road, then newly built and backing on to Brompton Cemetery, where their two sons were born; John Erskine (usually called Erskine) in summer 1877 and Hamish on 8th September 1878: a third son died at premature birth in 1882. From early 1879 to 1884 they lived at 3 Edwardes Place, a late-Georgian terrace set back from Kensington High Street, then moved for three years to 4, The Studios, Stratford Avenue, half a mile to the south-east. For thirty years from 1887 they were at Park Cottage, a small house in a green oasis behind Pelham Street, South Kensington, where John built an adjoining studio. From 1918, after which he largely retired, John and his wife moved to 8 Well Road, Hampstead – very close to Hampstead Heath and Constable's former house. In the 1901 census their elder son, John Erskine, was noted as an ‘art student’ still living with them but died of typhoid in Cairo on 17th July 1904, presumably while visiting his uncle Erskine Edward there. His father died on 31st May 1926 and was buried at Hampstead: Charlotte Nicol was buried at Kensington when she followed in 1936. Hamish, the surviving son, became a surgeon. He served as a lieutenant in the RAMC during the First World War and was also buried at Hampstead in 1954, after dying during a visit to Scotland.

Nicol exhibited at the Royal Academy in 33 of the 43 years between 1876 and 1918, then last in 1924. He also showed work at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists after 1880, the ROI (of which he was elected a member in 1888), the Royal Scottish Academy, the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, the Manchester Academy, and the Liverpool Autumn Exhibitions. Although based in London he also painted in Scotland and France, and the monthly journals Good Words (1890) and Black & White (1896) include some illustrations by him: at least one of subjects (The Letter) was also reproduced in The Graphic (6th December 1880). The Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, and the Fleming Collection, London, each have two of his paintings; Sheffield and Calderdale one. His Scottish emigration subject, Lochaber no more (exh. RA, 1883), is that by which he is largely remembered, in part because it was engraved by the Art Union in 1884. This is now in the Fleming Collection which also has a fine portrait study of a Highland Chieftain dated 1890, possibly using the same male model. He also did some society portraits, including one of Kaiser Wilhelm II for the United Service Club, London (exh. RA 1900): Gloucester Museums have one of the politician Viscount St Aldwyn; Queen’s College, Oxford, that of William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury; and Leighton House one of Sir Thomas Hewitt KC.

Mary Douglas Nicol (b.1913), John’s niece and daughter of his half-brother Erskine Edward, became an anthropologist, better known as Mary Leakey. She and her husband, the archaeologist and palaeo-anthropologist Louis Leakey (1903–1972), did pioneering work on human evolution, largely in the African Rift Valley: she died in Nairobi in 1996.

Summarised from Art UK’s Art Detective discussion ‘Could anyone tell us more about the artist John Watson Nicol (1856–1926)?’, with thanks to Osmund Bullock for further comments.