Still Life with Fruit and Compotier is a characteristic still-life painting from an early phase of Duncan Grant’s mature, post-war period, the stylistic hallmarks of which were enriched impasto, lowered lighting and a darkened palette. The principal subjects are a silver coffee pot, a compotier filled with ripe apples, and a white tea cup. These are tastefully arranged on a patterned tray, the flat surface of which is adorned with a daffodil motif and the upturned edge of which carries decorative spots. The picture is naturalistic, using single-point perspective and evoking the play of light and shade in rich polychromy, most sensitively observed in the flickering highlights of the coffee pot’s reflective surface. Yet the formality of the picture produces intelligent ambiguities. The paintwork is a mosaic of opaque touches, flattening the sense of depth and drawing areas of light and shade into a single continuous plane. Likewise the raking, elevated perspective, which produces a frontal view of the tray’s schematic decoration and foreshortens the coffee pot spout. Moreover, by cropping the tray and showing only two of its corners, the picture’s formality is further enhanced by eliminating the foreground.

Coffee pots were a favoured still-life subject of Grant’s over a long career. In the nineteen-tens and early twenties, he treated the subject of coffee time in several pictures (figs. 1 and 2). These pictures show that Grant owned a number of different pots, some of which were presumably acquired in part for the purpose of making pictures such as Still Life with Fruit and Compotier. The Coffee Pot (fig. 3), a distinguished painting in the tonal manner adopted by Grant after the First World War, shows an attractive café-au-lait pot with a jaunty handle of the kind manufactured by Asprey’s in these years.

The eponymous compotier was depicted in several other still-life paintings by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. It is present on the dining room table in a large-scale canvas by Grant, Interior (1918, Ulster Museum, Belfast), where Bell is shown painting it in one of her own easel paintings. According to the Bloomsbury Group scholar Richard Shone, who was personally acquainted with Grant towards the end of his life, ‘the opaline compotier depicted was a favourite object at Charleston. It was given to Duncan Grant by Barbara Bagenal (née Hiles), and is still at the house today.’ (Bagenal existed on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group, having a brief affair with Clive Bell and camping in a tent on the lawn at Charleston in the summer of 1917, shortly after Vanessa Bell and Grant moved there.)

This painting, known by the title ‘Still Life with Fruit and Compotier’, may be identified with a number of paintings that Grant exhibited in 1920 and 1921. In his first solo exhibition, held at the Carfax Gallery in February 1920, two paintings depicted coffee pots. Later that year, Grant showed ‘water-colours’ at the Independent Gallery, one of which was entitled ‘The coffee tray’. Although Still Life with Fruit and Compotier is painted in oils and not watercolour, the support is paper and this may have justified its inclusion in the exhibition. In the London Group’s exhibition of May 1921, Grant exhibited a picture entitled ‘The Tray’. This is plausibly the same picture as The coffee tray shown at the Independent Gallery the previous autumn. In any case, whether or not Still Life with Fruit and Compotier is one of these pictures, they demonstrate how productive Grant’s coffee-inspired still-life theme was in the early twenties.