In this important example of Ben Nicholson’s work, the jug dominates the composition while the flowers are a more delicate feature. The jug depicted survives and was displayed alongside the painting in the exhibition Ben Nicholson: From the Studio (Pallant House Gallery, 2021). It is a piece of early nineteenth-century Staffordshire Mochaware and typical of the types of humble jugs, mugs and vases that filled the house and studio at Banks Head. Nicholson exchanged correspondence with Jim Ede discussing these simple vessels and their place in the home and in art. Ede wrote to him in the 1920s about his paintings of jugs, saying “they are lovable like you, for they are you”.

In July 1926, the Nicholsons met the young painter Christopher Wood. It was the same year that Ben became president of the Seven and Five Society, a London-based association of artists which he had been asked to join in 1924 by Ivon Hitchens. Nicholson was eager to make the Society more progressive with an avant garde approach and modernist agenda and Wood was the first artist he appointed. Wood stayed with the Nicholsons at Banks Head and painted with them both, and his commitment to a more primitive artistic vernacular can be seen in Ben’s work of the period and is particularly apparent in Striped Jug and Flowers. The painting is characterised by its flattened perspective, with the jug and flowers sitting on top of the worked and scraped canvas, presaging Nicholson’s abstract works of the next decade. In the summer of 1928 Wood and the Nicholsons made their first visit to Cornwall and it was on this trip that they came across the naive works of the mariner-painter Alfred Wallis in St Ives. This meeting reinforced to Nicholson and Wood that true modern art was not to be found in the formal surroundings of art school or the Royal Academy, but in the unencumbered, informal rendering of prosaic objects and everyday life.