Designer, printmaker and painter E Q Nicholson (née Elsie Queen Myers), daughter of the writer L H Myers, studied for a year in Paris concentrating on Batik, becoming a designer of rugs and wallpapers for Marion Dorn, E McKnight Kauffer and Cole & Son - her best-known applied design, Runner Bean (c. 1950), was used as a furnishing fabric in HM Yacht Britannia. She married the architect Kit Nicholson, son of the painter William Nicholson, whose work she assisted. She began painting in 1941 and had one solo show at émigré gallerist Erica Brausen’s Hanover Gallery in 1950. A flourishing quince tree in her garden in Hampshire inspired her series of still lifes with quinces.