Spring Flowers in Omega Vase is a still life that Duncan Grant painted during his involvement with the Omega Workshops, which extended from their opening in July 1913 until he left London for the country in 1916. The vase in the foreground contains a generous bunch of narcissi, which flower through February, March and April, and this painting was likely made in the spring of either 1914 or 1915. The vase itself depicts two nude figures against consecutive bands of blue and yellow. It is almost certainly one of the early hand-painted wares sold by the Workshops, likely painted by Grant himself. There are two paint pots at the lower right-hand corner, and a paint brush stands in the right-hand pot. The background of the picture is filled by an abstract design with angular geometric patterns in bright colours of green, pink, red, orange and yellow. This may be a painted screen, printed fabric, wallpaper or a design pinned to the wall. It produces a heightened sense of flatness and diminishes the illusion of depth in the picture, which effect is compounded by the shallowness of the table surface. The flatness of the picture is also the result of Grant’s manner of applying thin paint in discrete patches. In 1914 and 1915, such painting was among the most advanced and imaginative being made in Britain.

To begin, Grant studied his subject from life and mapped out the composition in a sparse and informal line drawing. The ample proportions of the canvas guided his design, and the scale of the subject in the picture is somewhat larger than life. The paint quality is limpid, liquid and translucent, and the line drawing shows through at the surface. In several places on the vase the paint was so liquid it trickled down the canvas. There is an evident technical and stylistic debt to Grant’s contemporaneous watercolours, while Simon Watney has suggested that Grant’s visit to Matisse’s exhibition of recent Moroccan paintings at Bernheim Jeune in April 1913 ‘encouraged him to experiment with the use of thinner paint in his portraits and still-lifes.’ The initial pencil outlines provided a rough guide and in some places Grant diverged from them. To the right of the vase, the position of the table edge is painted below the pencil line. Paint was mixed in full colour, and Grant’s palette (as in his watercolours) is brilliant and luminous. The colouring of the narcissi is especially virtuosic and they were painted in a narrow range of mint green, pale ochre, pastel yellow and off-white. Notwithstanding the fulsome decorative colour, Grant worked from life and appearances were his guide. The play of shadows is carefully observed: the light falls from the right and casts a shadow behind the vase across the table and the back wall beyond it.

Despite its apparent informality, the painting required disciplined execution and fastidious control of the medium. The surface of the canvas is divided into discrete, cleanly defined areas of colour, and there are pleasing leaps and contrasts of colour from one area to the next. Paint was applied using short strokes of a fine brush, and in several areas there is an effect of hatching where the brush was laid in consecutive parallel strokes, which heightens the studied sense of pictorial flatness. At the base of the vase and elsewhere, interstices between neighbouring areas allow the untouched canvas to grin through—a stylistic device learned from Henri Matisse whose studio at Issy-les-Moulineaux Grant had visited in spring 1911. Moreover, as Frances Spalding has suggested, this visit introduced Grant to the notion of using another picture in the background as an integral element of the composition, as appears in Spring Flowers in Omega Vase:

"Matisse’s painting, Nasturtiums, incorporates part of the large decorative work, Dance, into the background, actual space blending with pictorial space as the real flowers merge with the painted figures in an uninterrupted continuum, a visual idea that Duncan adopted for his own purposes, from now on frequently blending still-life objects or flowers with background cloths, pictures or mural decorations."

Along with several other paintings made by Grant and Vanessa Bell in 1914 or 1915, Spring Flowers in Omega Vase has a style grounded in their contemporaneous watercolour technique. The style is defined by brilliant limpid colour; areas of exposed canvas; and liquid paint applied in a single layer. It is a mode of distinctive freshness and clarity, and white canvas breathes through a single layer of translucent oil paint. Instead of underpainting, which traditionally enabled an artist to map areas of light and shadow, Grant and Bell achieved the full range of tonal effects by modulating pure colour at the surface. This technique is almost indistinguishable from that required in watercolour painting, which harnesses the brilliance of white paper to intensify colour. In their watercolours of these years, both Grant and Vanessa Bell preserved the clarity and freshness of colour by applying the medium once and in cleanly separated areas. Whether in oil or watercolour, this style is marked by technical ease and fluency, and without it the need for correction and revision would otherwise have muddied and corrupted the results. Other paintings made in this style include two paintings of Vanessa Bell by Grant, Grant and Bell’s paintings of David Garnett and Mary Hutchinson, and two flower paintings by Bell. Most of these paintings similarly employ the device of a picture or decorative design in the background.

Grant never dedicated himself to a single style of painting, and there are often stark differences between contemporaneous paintings made in self-consciously different styles and for divergent purposes. In invented or decorative subjects, there was often a more experimental attitude towards form. Easel paintings, often painted from life, also differed considerably within a short period of time. The Mantelpiece (dated 1914, Tate) is markedly different from the limpid watercolour style of Spring Flowers in Omega Vase, for instance: papier collé elements are integrated within the painted surface, the key is lower and the colours more saturated. By the same token, Omega Paper Flowers on the Mantelpiece, 46 Gordon Square (c. 1914–15) has dissonant contrasts of bright, saturated colour and paint of greater weight and body. Simon Watney has explained that Grant ‘never aspired to a single, coherent stylistic manner, to be consistently recognised across the different media in which he worked, or even within any one of these. Throughout his life he remained a “bricoleur”, selecting his subject and manner according to the job in hand.’

Spring Flowers in Omega Vase was made at a time when the Omega Workshops exercised a powerful influence over Grant’s creative efforts. Established as a private limited company by Roger Fry in 1913 and operating from 33 Fitzroy Square, the Omega Workshops was a vehicle to promote artist-made wares for practical everyday use. It styled itself as a company of ‘artist decorators’ and was listed in the telephone directory as interior decorators. Grant was a shareholder and company director along with Fry and Vanessa Bell. The venture followed from the ‘Post-Impressionist’ exhibitions that Fry curated at the Grafton Galleries in 1910 and 1912, and its animating purpose was to oppose commercial manufactured wares, which were made for profit and without joy as Fry explained:

"[…] the modern factory products were made almost entirely for gain, no other joy than that of money making entered into their creation. […] The Omega Workshops, Limited is a group of artists who are working with the object of allowing free play to the delight in creation in the making of objects for common life."

The company offered a dizzying range of products and bespoke services. One could order rugs and doormats, printed and dyed fabric, toys, pottery, cushion covers and curtains, painted screens, furniture, mosaics, stained glass, ladies’ handbags and inlaid trays. There was also a show room from which trinkets such as boxes and paper flowers could be purchased.

At the Omega Workshops, Grant discovered for the first time how stimulating it was to work on decorative and fine art concurrently. The informality of the former encouraged new forms of invention in the latter. Speaking about the Omega Workshops in 1969, he explained: ‘it was very inspiring to be given special jobs to do, for definite purposes, and all sorts of ideas I think came out of doing decorative things […].’ The patterned background of Spring Flowers in Omega Vase bears an elementary resemblance to one of the Workshops’ printed fabrics called ‘Maud’, designed by Vanessa Bell. As with the patterned background, ‘Maud’ intersects brightly coloured rectilinear shapes. Such decorative designs formed the basis for the earliest abstract paintings made in Britain, which Bell and Grant painted in 1914 and 1915. One example was a long narrow scroll called Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound, and its vertical and diagonal bars of colour bear a family resemblance to those in the patterned background of Spring Flowers in Omega Vase. The painting’s patterned background may have been a preliminary design, attached to the wall of Grant’s studio, which related to the scroll. Pen and ink drawings related to the scroll use elongated upright rectangles and diagonal lines which are similar to the background of this painting.

Spring Flowers in Omega Vase is informative about the Omega Workshops, the kind of wares it produced and the startling vision of interior decoration it projected. Besides a handful of contemporary black-and-white photographs, there are only fragmentary remains of the company’s large and varied output. As Alan Clutton-Bruck suggested in 1959, ‘Roger Fry and his assistants were not always as careful as they should have been to use the right materials and ensure the permanence of their work’; hence ‘the products of the Omega Workshops have now become excessively rare’. Virginia Woolf concurred: ‘Sometimes there were failures. Cracks appeared. Legs came off. Varnish ran.’ The ‘Omega vase’ shown in this painting does not correspond with any extant Omega wares. The company made pottery in eclectic styles: monochrome slipware; playful animal motifs hand-drawn in pastel colours; geometric designs in contrasting colours (red and green, for example). In the pottery section of an Omega Workshops trade catalogue, reference was made to ‘vases and bowls suitable for flowers, large jars, jugs, etc.’. The vase in this painting was one such item.

This painting was owned by Cecil Francis Taylor (1886–1955), classicist and master at Clifton College, Bristol. It is not known when he acquired it, but it was likely bought from Grant privately as few of his early paintings of this period were publicly exhibited until much later in his life. Taylor met Grant as an undergraduate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, when Grant visited in 1909 and painted Taylor’s portrait. He was a student of J. T. Sheppard who in turn belonged to the wide circle of friends that included Grant, Maynard Keynes, the Strachey brothers, Vanessa and Clive Bell, and so on. Over the course of his life Taylor acquired modern British pictures by Grant, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Edward Morland Lewis, John Banting, Cedric Morris and Paul Nash. These he bequeathed to Clifton College, which dispersed them in 2025.