This work comes from a series of experimental still lifes that Peploe painted around the years of the outbreak of the First World War. Space and volume are flattened and form is delineated in thick black outlines. It reveals an awareness of the ‘cloisonnist’ and ‘synthetist’ styles of painting practiced by artists such as Anne Estelle Rice, Jessica Dismorr and Marguerite Thompson, who were part of Peploe’s circle in Paris. It shows a Chinese blue and white porcelain brush pot, probably of the eighteenth century, which appears repeatedly in Peploe’s work of the 1920s.