Mark Gertler executed this still life while staying at Garsington Manor in August 1917, the Oxfordshire pile of society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell. The painting is executed with bravura, using vibrant colouring and a compact, painterly manner. Despite its apparent confidence, however, Gertler executed it during a period of uncertainty about the direction of his work. Cézanne was the dominant influence on his work in this period. Gertler was already completely absorbed in a large and complex bathing composition (Bathers, 1917-18, Private Collection) when, in April 1917, he had a formative encounter with Roger Fry at the Omega workshops. Fry had reviewed Ambrose Vollard’s biography on Cézanne the same year, and Gertler may have studied this volume closely at Garsington that summer.

Fry also asked Gertler to contribute to an exhibition of ‘translations’ of past masters by contemporary artists that May, and Gertler responded with a ‘Yiddish Cézanne’, a still life of fruit and flowers against a rumpled blue cloth. This was the start of a connection between Gertler and Fry which was at its most intense over the next 18 months, but lasted until Fry’s death in 1934. From then on, Gertler valued Fry’s criticism and was greatly encouraged by the older man’s ‘appreciation and understanding of my work’, especially his experimental sculpture, The Acrobats, which Gertler complained ‘so few people can make anything of.' In return, Fry was impressed to find Gertler ‘really passionately as an artist – a most rare and refreshing thing.’ When he included four Gertlers in a group exhibition representing 'The New Movement in Art' in Birmingham in July 1917, which transferred to Heal’s Mansard Gallery in October, Fry wrote to Vanessa Bell that he was proud of the way in which he’d got over the ‘difficulty’ of hanging Gertler – a remark which suggests that Gertler’s work, though not unappreciated, had a peculiarity at once separate from and amenable to the dominant Bloomsbury aesthetic.

In September 1917, Clive Bell wrote to Mary Hutchinson from Garsington that Gertler had just shown him four pictures painted there that summer. ‘They are really very interesting and superbly conscientious; I don’t think there is anyone in England but Duncan [Grant] who can do better. One of them, a landscape, is a delightful work and about half as good as a de Vlaminck. All are under the influence of Cézanne.’

The bold colouring and simplification of forms make this still life particularly striking and successful. When it was exhibited at The London Group exhibition at the Mansard Gallery in November 1917 under the title Flowers, it prompted Dora Carrington to write to Gertler, ‘I want to tell you how very much I liked your Still-Lifes in the London Group – Especially the big one – with drapery making a shape.’ The work was subsequently bought by Jas Wood, a fellow artist and part of the Downshire Hill circle centred on the Carline family. Gertler wrote to Richard Carline in October that he was ‘only too pleased to sell a picture to [Jas] Wood – I am glad to feel that he appreciates my work to the extent that he would actually want to possess one.’


Biography

Mark Gertler was born in London in 1891 into a Jewish-Polish immigrant family living in the city's East End. In 1908, after receiving funding from the Jewish Education Aid Society, he enrolled at the Slade School of Art, and studied under the Professor of Drawing, Henry Tonks. His contemporaries during his four years at the Slade included Paul Nash, David Bomberg, C.R.W. Nevinson, Stanley Spencer, and Dora Carrington, whom Gertler loved unrequitedly throughout his life. Whilst at the Slade, Gertler gained a reputation as a particularly talented draughtsman, winning several painting prizes, a two-year Slade scholarship in 1909 and a British Institute Scholarship in 1911.

Gertler first exhibited at the Friday Club, an exhibition network closely linked with the Bloomsbury Group, in 1911, and was elected to the London Group in 1915. His first solo show was with the Goupil Gallery in 1921, with whom he had several solo and group exhibitions throughout his career. Gertler was a conscientious objector during the First World War, and painted the seminal work Merry-Go-Round (1916, Tate Collection) to reflect his vision of the death and destruction wreaked by war.

Extraordinarily talented, Gertler is among the most significant and internationally renowned British artists of the twentieth-century. Tormented, depressed, and constantly in love, he quarreled with lovers, friends and collectors alike. He was adored by D.H. Lawrence, detested by Virginia Woolf, and variously patronised by Lady Ottoline Morrell, the collector Edward Marsh, and the poet Gilbert Cannan. Major posthumous exhibitions of his work were held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (1949); the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (1971); the Camden Arts Centre (1992); and the Ben Uri Gallery & Museum (2002). His work is held in major international collections including the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.