We are grateful to Richard Shone for his assistance with this catalogue note.

Painted in the Garden Room at Charleston, this still-life by Duncan Grant reveals the characteristic fusion of colour and texture for which his most accomplished works are known.

Outdoor painting was curtailed in wartime England, so Grant returned repeatedly to the still-life genre, using objects around the house, both old and new, as his inspiration. This work shows a selection of flowers placed in an old coffee pot, still in the Charleston collection.

A group of wartime still-life works were exhibited in his first one-man exhibition at the Carfax Gallery in early 1920. One of these works was acquired by John Maynard Keynes and is now at King’s College, Cambridge. It follows the present composition, but it is painted in a more conventional style without the playful perspective and the modulation of brisk blocks of colour. At this date, Grant would often paint two or three versions of a composition to experiment with colour, drawing and perspectives.

Compared with the more naturalistic composition, Grant here abandons descriptive colour and coherent recession. The coffee pot is so freely reimagined in colour as to bear only a loose relation to its actual appearance, and the surrounding elements are compressed into a shallow arrangement of interlocking planes. The significance of colour was explored beyond that canvas at Charleston, and almost immediately upon their arrival, Grant and Bell set to work redecorating the house's surfaces with colour and painted motifs. It was an ongoing project that, like their art, developed in parallel with their tastes and interests.