The year 1916 marked a significant creative breakthrough in Gertler’s career. After conceiving the idea for his masterpiece The Merry-Go-round (Tate Collection) in spring 1915, he began work on the painting in early 1916 and completed it by autumn. It was a daring characterisation in which the harsh, mechanised quality of his figures was underpinned by a forceful, non-naturalistic simplification of colour and tone. The image is a unique and troubled work of genius, some aspects of which are apparent even in still life paintings of this period. Having severed his beneficial financial arrangement with the patron Eddie Marsh the previous year, he was compelled in May 1916 to break off from painting The Merry-Go-Round so he could produce ‘some small saleable things’. It is possible that Flowers was one such painting, though the seasonal flowers in the painting (dahlias and daisies) rather indicate it was executed in summer or autumn. The richly accentuated colouring of Flowers has the same dissonance as The Merry-Go-Round and, as with many other paintings by Gertler from 1916, it intelligently reconciles a sumptuous tactile quality with a mood of unease. Throughout his career Mark Gertler relied on the method which he learned at the Slade School of Fine Art, always working assiduously from life models. Still-life paintings like Flowers were invariably painted from an arrangement in the studio. Yet he systematically deviated from natural appearances, in particular with his striking harmonies and contrasts of non-naturalistic colour. He was emboldened in these experiments by the example of recent French artists, principally Paul Cézanne, whose effervescent colouring and broken brushwork had a formative impact on British art of Gertler’s generation. Flowers is a vivid example of Gertler’s experimental non-naturalistic palette. The vase of flowers is cropped at its base, concealing the spatial relationship between the vase, the table it stands on and the backdrop. In consequence, the flowers appear to float and project forwards, brightly illuminated against uncertain surroundings. Standing in close proximity to his subject, the painter observed the arrangement from a three-quarter-length perspective which afforded both a frontal view of the vase and an elevated overview of the bouquet. An area of richly saturated ultramarine fills the lower three quarters of the picture, delineated by a diagonal which drops down from right to left. This sloping line affects the composition and serves to offset the centred, frontal view of the flowers. The blue is presumably a textile which Gertler used to cover up the bare wooden table which appears in some contemporaneous works. Bunched, spread and draped fabrics recur in many of his still-life paintings, occasionally inspired by Cézanne’s use of them, and a selection of textiles was evidently kept in the studio as useful props. The upper part of the background is dominated by an area of flamboyant, brightly illuminated green. This remarkable colour bears no tonal relationship to any other colour in the painting, acting as a stark contrast beside which the neighbouring flowers of red, purple and yellow appear limpid and fresh. Though the adoption of pure colour was an Impressionist technique, it was the likes of Van Gogh, Cézanne and Gauguin who first applied colour for formal purposes and in disregard for natural appearances. Following this example, Gertler’s painting dispenses with tonal relationships and heightens the saturation of each individual colour. So bright is the green background that it was plausibly painted under electric light. Areas of shadow form at the upper right- and left-hand corners, suggesting a directed light source. It is reasonable to presume that Flowers was painted at night, and that the areas of deep shadow and the brightness of the colour derive from artificial lighting.