Painted at Charleston during the artist’s most radical decade, this notable still-life by Duncan Grant reveals the characteristic fusion of colour and texture for which his best works are known. Grant’s importance to the development of modern art in Britain cannot be overstated: his ability to synthesise European artistic trends with a uniquely British sensibility helped pave the way for a truly avant-garde modernism in the UK.

Painted in the Garden Room (or the living room, as Grant would have known it), this work shows the bold stylistic traits that underpinned his reputation as a leading modern artist. The impact of Roger Fry’s exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists on Grant and his generation is hard to overstate. This first meaningful exposure to modern French art – seen firsthand and not through black and white illustrations – resulted in a change of mindset, with caution and convention giving way to experimentation with colour and form. An intense period of production followed, in which established rules of design fell away and Grant sought to translate his subject as he interpreted it, with broken perspectives and patchworks of colour.

Wartime England curtailed outdoor painting, so Grant returned repeatedly to the still-life genre at this date. Ensconced at Charleston, Grant further absorbed the work of the great French painters and during this period painted some of his best-known works. Vanessa Bell and Grant filled Charleston with objects both old and new, transforming the house itself into a richly layered work of art and a constant source of inspiration. The coffee pot represented here, likely bought back from Italy, was painted in still lifes by both Grant and Bell and remains in the collection at Charleston today.

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, titled Clematis, was acquired by John Maynard Keynes and is now at King’s College, Cambridge. It follows the present composition almost exactly, but it is painted in a more conventional style without the playful perspective and the modulation of brisk blocks of colour. This was common for Grant, who would sometimes paint two or three versions in order to explore various aspects of design in compositions he found interesting and engaging.

The present work was acquired from the artist by a collector, in whose possession it remained until it was sold in 2003. Having remained in a private collection since then, and never before exhibited, it represents a fascinating opportunity to study firsthand a work from this important period of Grant’s oeuvre.