The wide, narrow format of this painting suggests it was conceived as the design for a bed-end. The composition is dominated by a vase from which several flowers and fronds emanate, reaching outwards in exaggerated arcs across the full width of the plane. The treatment is stylised and flat, and each motif is depicted frontally with utmost clarity and emphatic shapeliness. The bright, full palette—red, yellow, blue, pink, green and white—and the broken, patterned brushwork are decorative expositions of the Post-Impressionist style that Vanessa Bell used between 1912 and 1919. The style found expression in applied art and furniture, especially at the Omega Workshops Ltd, of which Bell was a director, and the making of this painting has sometimes been related to similar products made by that company.

After Vanessa Bell completed Vase of Flowers: Design for an Omega Bed-end, it apparently remained in her possession until her death. It first came to the open market in the nineteen-eighties, at which time there was growing interest in the Omega Workshops and the Bloomsbury milieu. The work was catalogued and widely exhibited at that time. Anthony d’Offay was the agent for Vanessa Bell’s estate and he included this painting in his important exhibition The Omega Workshops: Alliance and Enmity in English Art 1911–1920 held in 1984. In the exhibition catalogue, this entry accompanied Vase of Flowers: Design for an Omega Bed-end:

'The plain vertical surfaces of a bed-head and bed-end invited decorative treatment. Roger Fry painted a bed for Mme Lalla Vandervelde, Duncan Grant one for Vanessa Bell (‘Morpheus’ bed, The Charleston Trust) and Vanessa Bell one for Mary Hutchinson and another for Barbara Bagenal. A custom emerged at the Omega Workshops of painting a reclining female nude for the bed-head, and a bowl of fruit or a vase of flowers for the bed-end. The large, bending flowers of this work relate to the bedroom door decorations by Vanessa Bell of 1918 at Charleston and were a feature of many Omega designs—the back of Grant’s Omega signboard for example.'

In 1987, the painting was exhibited in another significant display of modernist British art at the New York dealer Hirschl & Adler. Many works in the exhibition were borrowed from Anthony d’Offay. This painting was illustrated in the catalogue where it was accompanied by a further catalogue note:

'The Bloomsbury artists believed in beautifying their environment, and, as part of the general decor of their home, the headboards of their beds were decorated with brightly colored [sic] arrangements of flowers and figures. The horizontal format of this painting suggests that it was probably intended as a design for a headboard.'

More recently, when the painting was sold at Christie’s in 2012, a more nuanced account was given by the Bloomsbury specialist Richard Shone:

'This design, almost certainly for the headboard (or possibly endboard) of a bedstead, was made in 1917. Although the Omega Workshops was still in business at that time, Vanessa Bell (and Grant) were by then doing very little work for the enterprise and, instead, undertook some private commissions in their own names rather than under the anonymous logo of the Omega. Bell designed a bedhead, for example, for Mary Hutchinson and the present work may be related to that commission. The languorous flowers and acanthus leaves are typical of her decorative motifs and also appear in, for example, her major wall decoration The Tub (Tate Britain), also of 1917.'