With three brothers, Nancy (1899-1977), seen here at the age of about ten, was always a tomboy while the whole family enjoyed charades and dressing up and had a keen interest in the theatre; she was the subject of costume studies by both her parents. Mabel and her artist brother James Pryde were passionately keen on the theatre and would have been familiar with the characters of the commedia dell-arte and French pantomime. Pierrot was a common sight at seaside resorts in Britain in the latter part of the nineteenth century in the first half of the twentieth. James Pryde liked to dress up as this character, and in 1897 he appeared as Pierrot, playing an accordion, on the beach at Southwold, Suffolk. 

Mabel Pryde, 1871-1918

Mabel Pryde was born in Edinburgh into an artistic dynasty. While studying at a progressive art school in Hertfordshire, Mabel eloped with fellow student, William Nicholson, and set up house in Buckinghamshire, where they were joined by her brother, James. A swagger painter to equal her brother and husband, Mabel often used her children as models in their dramatized domestic sphere or in costume. Following in their mother's footsteps, her daughter Nancy became a textile designer, and her son Ben a key player in the development of British modernism. Mabel died young of influenza.