EQ Nicholson

EQ Nicholson
Self-portrait in wax crayon and coloured ink, circa 1943 (detail)
Born	Elsie Queen Myers 4 November 1908 London
Died	7 September 1992 London
Known for	Painting, textile design
Spouse(s)	Christopher "Kit" Nicholson

EQ Nicholson (4 November 1908 – 7 September 1992) was an English painter and textile designer.

Elsie Queen Myers was born in London on 4 November 1908, the daughter of the novelist Leo Myers and his American-born wife Elsie Mellen Palmer; her sister Eveleen was born in 1910. Her paternal grandparents were the writer Frederic W. H. Myers and the photographer Eveleen Tennant; her maternal grandfather was General William Jackson Palmer of Delaware, from whose wife Mary "Queen" Palmer, née Mellen, she received her second name.

Her father frequented writers and artists including members of the Bloomsbury Group, the sculptor Frank Dobson and the painter Cedric Morris. Leo Myers committed suicide on 7 April 1944 by taking an overdose of Veronal.

In 1931, EQ married the architect Christopher "Kit" Nicholson, youngest son of the painters William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde, and brother to Ben Nicholson and Nancy Nicholson. Kit and EQ had three children: two daughters, Jane Kasmin and textile designer Louisa Creed, and a son, the painter Tim Nicholson. During the Second World War EQ and the children lived at first at Yew Cottage on Cranborne Chase in Dorset, and then, from 1941 until 1947, at Alderholt Mill House, near Fordingbridge in Hampshire. Kit Nicholson died of injuries following a glider crash in Italy on 28 July 1948.

EQ died in London in 1992.

EQ trained briefly at the Slade School of Fine Arts under Henry Tonks before studying batik in Paris in 1926. She later worked in batik as an assistant to Marion Dorn; she also designed rugs. When she was 20 she designed the interior of the new family home at Leckhampton House.