Still Life was painted at the height of Duncan Grant’s post-impressionist period in the years immediately after he and Vanessa Bell moved to Charleston Farmhouse, Sussex, in autumn 1916. The painting depicts three cut flowers—clematis or possibly dahlias—standing in a goblet. Two of the flowers are pictured frontally while a third is viewed from the side and partially concealed behind the left-hand flower. These blooms have an elaborate morphology and the various shapes of each petal have been carefully observed and transcribed. Most have billowing outlines and ogival tips. The two flowers on the left are partially illuminated by direct light, with these areas painted in brilliant white, while the right-hand flower is depicted in half tones splintered into shades of grey and lilac. The surroundings have been identified and described by the art historian and Duncan Grant specialist Richard Shone: ‘The glass stands on a stone slab in front of the fire grate in the dining room of [Charleston], against a decorative back board.’

The goblet in Still Life can be identified as a specific object now in the Charleston Trust’s collection (fig. 1). This receptacle dates to the nineteenth century and has a distinctive and elaborately moulded stem. It is made of milk glass—a translucent material reminiscent of porcelain—and decorated with a thick band of gilding around the rim, which is clearly visible in Grant’s painting. Grant and Bell decorated and furnished the house at Charleston in a richly eclectic style entirely novel for its period. They used a mixture of outmoded Victorian fabrics and furniture, eclectic objets acquired variously from the Omega Workshops (of which they were both company directors) and as gifts from friends, and hand-decorated inventions of their own, especially on the walls, firescreens and other semi-permanent fittings. This environment became a key component of both Grant and Bell’s still-life paintings, with objects and their settings translated into pictorial terms. Their unusual, visually interesting possessions and the interior spaces they crafted were essential ingredients in their creative endeavour, and Grant’s Still Life and other paintings like it belong to a broad spectrum of artistic activity.

As with other paintings made in 1917 and 1918, Grant treated the picture surface of Still Life as a solid mosaic of thick paint. Neighbouring areas were painted in distinct but finely graded tonal contrasts of light and dark. The naturalistic play of light depicted in the picture locks into the flat patterns of the paintwork, which is mostly built up with short downward brushstrokes that run diagonally from left to right. These years were notable for the balanced reconciliation of observed phenomena with decorative brushwork and paint’s material qualities. Later in 1918 and 1919, Grant abandoned the decorative aspect of his earlier work and thereafter preferred to use a naturalistic tonal style with a lower key and thicker impasto. As such, Still Life belongs to a late stage of painterly experimentation in which Grant explored a range of mark making, contrasts of bright colour and the tangible, materialistic, object-like character of painting: the energy and wide-ranging invention of that phase arguably distinguishes it above all others in Grant’s career.

Still Life was once owned by Sir John Rothenstein, director of the Tate Gallery between 1938 and 1964. Richard Shone has noted that Sir John’s father, the painter Sir William Rothenstein, was an early supporter of Duncan Grant’s, and he has suggested that this painting may have been a gift from Grant to Sir William.