Still Life with Decanter is a closely observed, lively executed drawing from the early post-impressionist period of Duncan Grant’s career. The picture was made using only short strokes of the pencil. The broken silhouettes of each object are suggested using marks similar to areas of parallel hatching, which create shading from dense scribbles of short lines. The short, hatched markings relate to the mode of hatched, handicraft brushstrokes that Grant and some of his peers at the Omega Workshops used between 1913 and 1919. As in certain paintings by Grant from this period, which emulated Matisse’s technique of exposing the unpainted canvas, many areas of the paper in this drawing are exposed while actively implying a formal presence; the negative space at the base of the compotier, for example, is carefully shaped by surrounding markings and actively suggests the upward curve of the base into the stem. The Cézannesque apples in the compotier similarly use the exposed paper as an active ingredient to create highlights. The sparing deployment of heavy shading, on the table top and the right-hand side of the objects, shows Grant creating an exactingly keyed tonal arrangement in which light, mid-tones and shade are sharply defined using the lightest of frameworks.

One of the objects depicted in this drawing is a certain opaline crystal compotier (a fruit dish) (fig. 1), which belonged to Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. It was given to them as a house-warming present by their friend Barbara Bagnal when they moved to Charleston Farmhouse in 1916, and it now belongs to the Charleston Trust. Grant used it in several of his paintings, including his significant large-scale canvas Interior (1918, Ulster Museum) and various other still-life paintings (fig. 2). At Charleston, Grant and Bell created a still-life culture in which purposeful arrangements of pleasant objects were contiguous with the conception and production of saleable paintings. This arrangement was self-sustaining: the making of pictures was an inducement to the visual activity of displaying objets; the intrinsic satisfaction of interestingly displayed objets was an inducement to make pictures of the same. The underlying interaction of a lifestyle and a formal, artistic endeavour was one of the distinctive, avant-garde aspects of Grant and Bell’s existence at Charleston—a subject that has been a topic of growing interest to art historians and the public in recent years.