This still-life painting was probably painted at Charleston, Duncan Grant’s home in Sussex. The flowers in the picture were probably cut from the garden. They are arranged in a glazed earthenware pitcher probably made in nineteenth-century Spain, which Grant reportedly acquired on a visit to Spain in 1923. The jug is now owned by The Charleston Trust. The jug was used in the composition of certain other still-life paintings, including Still life with tulips and narcissi in a jug.

The address inscribed on the reverse of the canvas, 24 Victoria Square, was Duncan Grant’s pied-à-terre in London from 1961 until 1970. The house was owned by Leonard Woolf and Grant rented a flat on the top floor. This still life was made in 1964. Woolf died four years later in 1968, and it is possible that he owned the painting. It was certainly owned by Leonard’s nephew Cecil Woolf, who lived in the basement and ground floor at Victoria Square, was friendly with Grant, and either acquired the painting by descent from Leonard or directly from the artist.

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.

Still Life was painted at the height of Duncan Grant’s post-impressionist period in the years immediately after he and Vanessa Bell moved to Charleston Farmhouse, Sussex, in autumn 1916. The painting depicts three cut flowers—clematis or possibly dahlias—standing in a goblet. Two of the flowers are pictured frontally while a third is viewed from the side and partially concealed behind the left-hand flower. These blooms have an elaborate morphology and the various shapes of each petal have been carefully observed and transcribed. Most have billowing outlines and ogival tips. The two flowers on the left are partially illuminated by direct light, with these areas painted in brilliant white, while the right-hand flower is depicted in half tones splintered into shades of grey and lilac. The surroundings have been identified and described by the art historian and Duncan Grant specialist Richard Shone: ‘The glass stands on a stone slab in front of the fire grate in the dining room of [Charleston], against a decorative back board.’

The goblet in Still Life can be identified as a specific object now in the Charleston Trust’s collection (fig. 1). This receptacle dates to the nineteenth century and has a distinctive and elaborately moulded stem. It is made of milk glass—a translucent material reminiscent of porcelain—and decorated with a thick band of gilding around the rim, which is clearly visible in Grant’s painting. Grant and Bell decorated and furnished the house at Charleston in a richly eclectic style entirely novel for its period. They used a mixture of outmoded Victorian fabrics and furniture, eclectic objets acquired variously from the Omega Workshops (of which they were both company directors) and as gifts from friends, and hand-decorated inventions of their own, especially on the walls, firescreens and other semi-permanent fittings. This environment became a key component of both Grant and Bell’s still-life paintings, with objects and their settings translated into pictorial terms. Their unusual, visually interesting possessions and the interior spaces they crafted were essential ingredients in their creative endeavour, and Grant’s Still Life and other paintings like it belong to a broad spectrum of artistic activity.

As with other paintings made in 1917 and 1918, Grant treated the picture surface of Still Life as a solid mosaic of thick paint. Neighbouring areas were painted in distinct but finely graded tonal contrasts of light and dark. The naturalistic play of light depicted in the picture locks into the flat patterns of the paintwork, which is mostly built up with short downward brushstrokes that run diagonally from left to right. These years were notable for the balanced reconciliation of observed phenomena with decorative brushwork and paint’s material qualities. Later in 1918 and 1919, Grant abandoned the decorative aspect of his earlier work and thereafter preferred to use a naturalistic tonal style with a lower key and thicker impasto. As such, Still Life belongs to a late stage of painterly experimentation in which Grant explored a range of mark making, contrasts of bright colour and the tangible, materialistic, object-like character of painting: the energy and wide-ranging invention of that phase arguably distinguishes it above all others in Grant’s career.

Still Life was once owned by Sir John Rothenstein, director of the Tate Gallery between 1938 and 1964. Richard Shone has noted that Sir John’s father, the painter Sir William Rothenstein, was an early supporter of Duncan Grant’s, and he has suggested that this painting may have been a gift from Grant to Sir William.