The Post this week is inspired by the new exhibition at Japan House in London which has just opened and runs until 16th February 2025. 'Looks Delicious! Exploring Japan's food replica culture' has received a great deal of publicity and reviews all of which testify to an enduring fascination with fake food 'in astonishing displays of impossibly realistic replica dishes', which in Japan have been turned into a 'dazzling art form'.

Mabel Nicholson died in 1918 aged forty-seven, a victim of the Spanish influenza epidemic. Her paintings are mostly in Scottish collections but this portrait (c1910-14) of her son, Ben, who was by this time already studying at the Slade, is in the NPG. Mabel's skill in emulating Manet, who, in turn, was inspired by Velázquez to use a dark background and dramatic lighting, shows what a great loss her early death was to painting.

From 1909 to 1914 the Nicholson family lived at the Grange in Rottingdean, a former vicarage which is now a local library and art gallery. In The Grange (c1911, National Galleries of Scotland) we see her daughter, Nancy (1899-1977), who became a successful painter and fabric designer and married Robert Graves, and Kit (1904-48) who went on to be an architect and designer. Mabel paid all of her children a small fee to model for her. 

Mabel Nicholson was apparently very shy and unwilling even to appear in family photo albums (she tore or scratched herself out of photographs). Instead she focused her own gaze on others, and the intensity of the portraits at which she excelled can sometimes be unsettling. This is her son, Kit, in The Red Jersey (c1912, Aberdeen). 

A new book by Lucy Davies about Mabel Nicholson has just been published by Eiderdown Books, As they say on a blog post, "Extracting Mabel from the shadow of the men in her life, and piecing together who she was in order to give an account of her own artistic achievements, has been no easy task". Yet she was "a free-spirited young girl, an adventurous and well-travelled woman", part of "a glittering bohemian circle and one of the most significantly overlooked talents of early 20th century British art". This is a portrait of Mabel (1897, National Galleries of Scotland) by William Nicholson.

This week on the Post we look at Mabel Pryde Nicholson (1871-1918) who is not included in 'Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920' at Tate Britain (until 13 October). As per the Tate website, her story is nearly always overshadowed by the artistic successes of the men in her family: husband William Nicholson, sons Ben and Kit, and brother James Pryde. This is Family Group (c1911, which, ironically, is in the Tate collection).

At its height, Cryséde had thousands of mail-order customers and twenty-eight shops shops, including one at 2 Quiet Street in Bath, not far from Persephone Books. There are still traces of the firm such as this mosaic at the entrance to the former Cryséde shop in Queen Square in Penzance (now a listed building), but by the late 1930s the enterprise had failed. The good news is that textile researchers such as Janet Axten are celebrating the Cryséde story and its  importance, particularly in Cornwall.