We are grateful to Richard Shone for his assistance when cataloguing this work.

Painted the year Duncan Grant moved to Charleston, this strikingly bold still-life hung on its walls as part of its occupants’ private collection throughout the twentieth century. Abstract in both concept and execution, this single work alone epitomises the radicalism that Grant and Vanessa Bell - encouraged by the art critic Roger Fry - brought so dramatically to the British art scene.

Artificial Flowers depicts a vase of ornamental flowers, possibly those produced by the Omega Workshop, arranged in a tall vase and placed on a decorative table. Here, Grant combines his eye for decorative design with painterly acumen. The shape of the flowers is reminiscent of the geometry observed in Grant’s earlier Omega designs, particularly his fire screen designs conceived in 1912-13 [fig. 1] here deploying his daring, directional brushstrokes.

The recent rediscovery of this painting in Switzerland - where its significance had been forgotten and subsequently overlooked - is an important readdiction to Grant’s early oeuvre. Its importance is further attested to by the existence of another version of this work, which Grant made after the present work in the 1960s, and which he gave to the writer, art historian, and AIDS activist Simon Watney.1 Softer and less radical in execution, it retains the same ambiguity between nature and artifice that captured Grant’s interest a couple of decades earlier.

1916 – the year this work was painted – was a life-changing year for Grant and his immediate Bloomsbury circle. It was the height of the First World War and, as conscientious objectors, Grant needed to find work of national importance to avoid conscription. Vanessa Bell secured a lease at Charleston Farmhouse and obtained employment for Grant and his lover David (Bunny) Garnett at a nearby farm. Immediately, the artists set about artistically adorning the interior fabric of the house. Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, Charleston– in which this still-life significantly figured - became the rallying point and ‘safe-haven’ for some of the period’s most progressive artists, writers and intellectuals.