Painted in 1929, Still Life With Green Jug marks a highly pivotal moment in the development of Ben Nicholson’s style. His very early paintings closely resembled the still-lifes of his father, William Nicholson, often relying on his father’s compositions as a model, but from 1920 onwards Nicholson embarked on an intense period of travel and experimentation that resulted in a rapid development of style. Nicholson relinquished the established ideas about the quality and finish of a painting, instead exploring the treatment of the surface, the pictorial space, and the synthesis of representation and abstraction, themes evident in the present work and fundamental to his artistic practice throughout his career.

Essential to Nicholson’s stylistic shift during this period were the relationships he developed, including a close friendship with fellow British artist Christopher Wood, whom he met in 1926. Together with Nicholson’s first wife Winifred, they formed an impressive triumvirate dedicated to the pursuit of a modernist life and style. The three artists worked and corresponded closely during the latter years of the 1920s and Winifred explained that:

Having married in 1920, Ben and Winifred traveled extensively in Europe during the early 1920s and intermediate visits to Paris in 1921 and 1923 were crucial in making the artistic trends of pre-war Paris known to them. Wood introduced even closer links to Continental modernist movements; he had lived in Paris in the early 1920s, met Picasso in 1923, Jean Cocteau in 1924 and mixed with the heady Parisian beau-monde centred around Diaghilev's Ballet Russes. In Still Life With Green Jug the flattened perspective and reduction of the forms to their simplest shapes, clearly allude to cubist influences and more specifically to Picasso and Braque’s Synthetic Cubism developed in the first decades of the 20^th Century.

The distinctive surface of the present work is also significant. The underlying ground is clearly visible beneath the multi-layered paint surface and as such, draws attention to the physical nature of the canvas itself. Winifred highlighted that it was Wood who introduced her and Ben to this technique of 'painting on coverine...it dries fast, you can put it over old pics' (Winifred Nicholson, ibid., p.24). It created a firm painting ground which was visible beneath the painted image.

The pared down forms, domestic subject and simple yet stylized handling of Still Life With Green Jug reflects a wider tendency, conscious or unconscious, throughout post-war Europe of a so-called rappel à l'ordre - the rejection of the machine age and any associated visual language such as Futurism and Vorticism developed during the years leading up to the First World War. It is within this context that Nicholson and Wood had discovered the work of Alfred Wallis in St Ives in 1928. A retired mariner, Wallis’ instinctive and untutored draftsmanship struck a particularly resonant chord with the two artists. They were instantly fascinated by the old mariner's paintings of 'ships and houses on odd pieces of paper and cardboard nailed up all over the wall' which had a raw immediacy that appealed directly to their modernist sensibilities (Nicholson, Horizon, Vol.VII, no.37, 1943).

Still Life with Green Jug undoubtedly represents a climax of Nicholson's early style, consolidating the influences and lessons he had amassed throughout the previous decade. It was painted during a watershed period; by 1930 Christopher Wood had committed suicide and his marriage with Winifred Nicholson was deteriorating. Taking up with Barbara Hepworth, Nicholson travelled Europe, encountering and forming lasting relationships with the European avant-garde such as Mondrian, Gabo, Miro, Braque and Arp, and took his work in a new direction.