This is one of a number of still lifes and interiors which Redpath painted at her home in Beaconsfield Terrace, Hawick, during the 1940s. In 1947 a reporter described the artist's sitting room: 'Immediately on entering... I felt as though I had stepped into one of her pictures. There was a tea tray standing on a little table as I had so often seen it, and, as on the painted tables, the cups did not match! On the mantelpiece were familiar pieces of crockery - a pink and white teapot, a petunia-coloured bowl, a Worcester jug with a bright band of blue around it.' Following the tradition of artists like Matisse and Vuillard, Redpath’s paintings are often intimate portrayals of her own domestic setting.