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This bold, colourful still-life was painted by Duncan Grant in 1962 and is a striking example of his later work. The geometric pattern of the red and white checked cloth is reminiscent of the textiles produced by the Omega Workshops between 1913 and 1919 and was one of Grant’s favourite props.

Grant was interested in art from a young age and was encouraged by a family friend - the French painter Simon Bussy – to pursue it as a career. After a brief period studying at art schools in Paris and London, Grant rented two rooms in Fitzroy Square and soon became close friends with Adrian and Virginia Stephens (later Woolf). Grant had already met their sister Vanessa (later Bell) earlier in 1905 at the Friday Club – an informal art group established by Bell with the aim of discussing the latest ideas about art and organising exhibitions. Grant exhibited with the Friday Club in 1910 and later that year visited Roger Fry’s ground-breaking exhibition of Post-Impressionist art at the Grafton Galleries. The exhibition, combined with Grant’s exposure to modern European art during his years in Paris, had a profound effect on his art and thereafter and soon developed a painting style characterised by bold colour and direct observation.

It was around this time that the Bloomsbury Group began to find its feet with Grant and Bell at the centre. The group became known for its liberal mindset and bohemianism – Grant, for example, had relationships with several other group members including Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes – whose rooms at Cambridge Grant decorated – and fellow artist Bell.

In 1913 Roger Fry established the Omega Workshops with Grant and Bell as creative directors. Their aim was to blend Post-Impressionist developments in painting with the decorative arts. They sold furniture, fabrics and other household objects made by artists and undertook decorative schemes including mural painting, stained glass design and mosaic work. They were, in essence, an experimental design collective aiming to dissolve the barrier between the fine and decorative arts. The influence of the Omega Workshop and the Post-Impressionists aesthetic suffuses the present work, through Grant’s bold, stylised strokes of paint and use of concentrated colour.

During the First World War, Grant moved to Charleston in East Sussex, with Vanessa Bell. Charleston soon became a popular haunt within fashionable bohemian circles and the house took on a life of its own with the unique creativity of its residents expressed through painted interior schemes and eclectic furnishings. Following the Second World War, Grant and Bell lived permanently at Charleston and in the post-war years focussed on landscape and still-life painting. The present work was almost certainly painted at Charleston and the jug at the centre of the composition was recorded as being at the house at the time of Grant’s death in 1978.