Palm Tree is among the most playful still lifes painted by Euan Uglow. The subject was staged in the artist’s studio with characteristic subtlety. The arrangement of a toy palm tree against an ultramarine wall marries a naturalistic suggestion of intense sun and vivid colour, redolent of a tropical island, and an exacting sense of pictorial artifice. For the purposes of the painting, the palm tree was set on a small block and its base painted a sandy colour. This base and the patterned tablecloth are telling subsidiaries in the arrangement, carefully limiting the painting’s suggestiveness. The picture space is extremely shallow, and the base and the table are heavily foreshortened. Yet the complete absence of shadow creates a studied ambiguity, making the distance between palm tree and backdrop indefinite and stretching it into an infinite recession. The effect is similar to how the sea on a warm day stretches into the distance, disappearing into the horizon at some indeterminate point.

The colour language of Palm Tree is carefully controlled and personally distinctive to Uglow’s oeuvre. In a rare interview given in 1997, Uglow said to the art critic Martin Gayford: ‘I like the poignancy of the right light at the right time hitting a bit of colour’. That intention, succinctly expressed but with far reaching consequences, is strongly apparent in Palm Tree. The painting’s effect is achieved in part by the resonant relationship between the palm tree, with its pale trunk and green leaves, and the vibrant blue backdrop behind it. The singular evenness and intensity of the light falling on both is also significant.

The distinctive blue wall used in the background of Palm Tree recurred in many of Uglow’s paintings. It plays an important part in other works such as Beautiful Girl Lying Down (1959), Still Life with Model Marks (1971-72) and Craigie’s Birthday Cake (1984-85). (The green fleur-de-lys tablecloth also appeared in certain other pictures by Uglow including Georgia’s Roses (1973).) Uglow adopted a craftsman’s attitude to his art, not only taking pains to construct elaborately systematic perspective in his work, but also mixing his own paint. One of his students at the Slade School of Fine Arts remembers how Uglow achieved that personally distinctive shade of blue using a branded washing powder, finely ground, as pigment.

Uglow’s laboriously precise method of execution is apparent in Palm Tree’s surface. Four red measuring marks hover above the tree’s canopy. An underlying grid, partially reiterated at the surface by localised incisions, was used to plot the position of the round table at the lower edge of the picture. Although Uglow latterly came to allow more evidence of measuring marks and plotting devices to show through at the surface of his paintings, in the seventies he maintained a strict control of these elements. Yet they are visually evident, communicating a sense of the painstaking studio process involved with the painting’s production and emphasising the tactile qualities of the tableau.

The leaves of the eponymous toy palm tree were made from plastic and the trunk from metal. It was a present from Uglow’s close friend, the painter Craigie Aitchison, and the painting reflects a shared feeling of mischievous humour that animated both artists’ work from time to time. Both were trained at the Slade under William Coldstream, and they shared a fine sense of how successful pictures are made using well-deployed techniques. In consequence, although they each developed personally distinctive styles, both Uglow and Aitchison’s work is imprinted with refined workmanship: the relation of shapes on a flat surface, contrived to create an illusion of depth; the duality of surfaces as intelligently applied paint and a legible image; the use of colour as both decoration and descriptive representation; and, crucially, a sense of playfulness in the process of generating a picture. Aside from the fact that Aitchison made a gift of it to him, Uglow’s choice of a toy palm tree for this painting was informed by Aitchison’s own unconventional choice of still life objects. At various times he used kitsch mugs, brightly packaged sweets and Easter eggs, models of donkeys and sheep, and so on. For both Aitchison and Uglow, a large measure of joy and humour lay behind the transformation of these inconspicuous objects into the timeless language of art.