Throughout his long life, Duncan Grant found in the still-life genre an unfailing source of visual interest. Using his immediate surroundings as subject matter, carefully arranged to yield an appropriate composition, he transposed homely settings—of wall paper, painted furniture, hanging textiles, cut flowers, tablewear—into formally compact paintings and drawings.

This display features a range of Grant’s still-life paintings and drawings. He and Vanessa Bell moved from London to Charleston in autumn 1916, and several pictures included here were made in the early years of his residence there. Through the years 1917–1920 his palette darkened and his paint thickened. Works such as Still Life and The Glass Cup were built up in mosaic touches of paint, carefully constructed in a tonal style and with strongly directional applications of the brush. As he matured and entered old age through the fifties and sixties, his painterly style remained distinctive and decorative even as the paint thinned and his palette became lighter and more naturalistic. The familiarity of his subjects was partly responsible for his adventurous approach to execution: to picture a table-top arrangement was inseparable from the activity of creating a formal construct from areas of light and shade. But the interiors he occupied, especially those of Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, were carefully designed. He knew that they would in turn provide material for a picture, and so the two activities—of paintings and decorating—came to be inseparable aspects of his creative existence.