Hartley painted still lifes throughout his career. Beginning in 1916, during a stay in Provincetown, he began to simplify his subjects, and in his still-life paintings done the following year in Bermuda, he often focused on a single vase of flowers arranged before a window, close to the picture plane and to the bottom of the picture. During this period he also painted individual floral arrangements set against an unmodulated black background, on glass, in the tradition of German folk art. In Pink and White Flowers in a Vase Hartley pared down the elements of the still life as he did in his glass paintings, omitting any references to a background or table. Unlike the glass pictures, this still life was vigorously painted with light and dark grays, perhaps to suggest atmosphere or shadows.
While such a heavily impastoed, creamy surface, bold use of black outline, and stark palette of gray, green, black, and white with only a touch of pink are seen in some of Hartley’s paintings of the early 1920s, these characteristics became more typical of his work from the 1930s, beginning with his Dogtown paintings. A penciled inscription on the upper stretcher bar, written by an unknown hand, dates the painting to 1929.
