Dating from circa 1940, this work relates closely to the small group of landscapes Nicholson made following his move to St Ives at the outbreak of the Second World War. The dedication in this work shows it was drawn while `nicholson was living at Dunluce, Trelyon, St Ives between December 1939 and the summer of 1942. Modest in scale and deliberately playful in character, these works marked Nicholson's renewed engagement with landscape. Their origins can be traced in part to Nicholson's 'George and Rufus' series of 1937 for a book which never was realised.

The move to St Ives provided Nicholson with a new repertoire of houses, harbour walls, light houses and seascapes and in this series, the sophistication of his abstract work is combined with a deliberately innocent 'toy-town' vocabulary.
The apparent innocence in these works was far from accidental. Peter Khoroche has described Nicholson's attraction to 'the consciously naive' relating to his desire to 'become a child, a primitive, and slowly create his own language':

'It was not only the childlike vision that inclined Nicholson towards the consciously naive (a stylistic trait that recurs throughout his work, right up to his latest drawings). There was, outside himself, a historical influence too - the subjective revolution in art which in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, had increasingly forced every serious artist to question first principles, to become a child, a primitive and slowly create his own language. This in turn was part of a larger reaction against the weight of tradition and the complexities of European civilisation in favour of an invigorating mixture of the primitve, the exotic and the childlike'.

This work bares similarities in the treatment of the architecture to '1940 (St Ives, version 3) sold in 2018 at Christies . These buildings and also the lighthouse feature in the 'George and Rufus' works - though not the cat character - though the Tate hold a photo of Nicholson holding a cat dated to the 1940s. It is inscribed and dedicated as a Christmas greeting to Nicholson's close friend and collaborator Alastair Morton who was the pioneering director of Edinburgh Weavers. Morton had worked closely with Nicholson during the 1930s, commissioning designs from as part of his ambitious programme of bringing modern art into textile production. In 1937 Morton's Edinburgh Weavers realised a nursery fabric based on the 'George and Rufus' series. Morton was also the owner of one of Nicholson's original 'George and Rufus' illustrations of 1938, acquired directly from Nicholson and also another closely related from this period titled 'St Ives, circa 1940 which sold at Christies in March 2024.

This work sits at a particularly interesting point in Nicholson's development, bringing together the playfull language of 'George and Rufus', his friendship with Alastair Morton and his renewed engagemetn with the landscape of St Ives at the beginning of the 1940s.