Flowers in Quentin Bell’s Mug is a sensitive life study, painted in the half-light of a darkened room in summer. A dim, even light comes from a window somewhere at the left-hand side. The still life consists of summer flowers, pinks and Astrantia, probably cut from the garden at Charleston, Vanessa Bell’s home in Sussex, which are arranged in a ceramic made by the artist’s son Quentin. The painting is mostly painted in half-tones in a low key. The mug is set close to the wall and casts a dim shadow. The wall and the table’s surface are treated in lightly variegated hues of grey, brown and green, which play against the bright local colour of the flowers. The vivid shapes and colours of white, pink, purple and red flowers are silhouetted against the plain background and seem to loom forwards.

Aside from his profession as an academic art teacher and art historian, Bell’s son Quentin was a keen ceramicist. He began experimenting with pottery at Charleston in the 1930s. The greatest concentration of his ceramics is held by the Charleston Trust, which has over two-hundred items that were either partly or wholly designed and made by Quentin Bell, ranging from tiles to plate and vessels. Some works were potted by Quentin and decorated by Vanessa, and consequently bear the initials of both. The ceramic depicted in this still-life painting by Vanessa Bell, identified in the title as ‘Quentin Bell’s mug’, was decorated using the language of ornament originated by the Omega Workshops. Modernist formality is tempered by historical borrowings from Italian, Chinese and Islamic ceramics. It is not possible to identify the specific mug in Bell’s painting and it does not appear to be in the Charleston Trust’s collection, though it relates closely to other mugs made by Quentin Bell in the early 1950s. Many of his cups from this time used a distinctively thick, looping handle (fig. 1).

As with many other still-life paintings by Vanessa Bell and her partner Duncan Grant, the decorative qualities of the ceramic mug lend themselves to the formal purposes of Bell’s picture. The area of pale green and the pattern of blue spots on the mug complement the contrasting colours of the pinks and Astrantia that it holds.

The authenticity of this work has been affirmed by Richard Shone.