During the 1930s, Lempicka enjoyed a period of sustained artistic success and relative financial prosperity, as her singular style of glamorous portraiture earned her commissions from figures within high society across Europe and a fervor for Art Deco sent several prolific and wealthy collects ors to her studio. At the onset of World War II, Lempicka and her husband fled Paris for the United States, joining an exodus of modern artists seeking refuge across the Atlantic. Unlike many of her fellow artists however, they settled in Los Angeles upon arrival in America, rather than the more traditional artistic enclave of New York City. It was during her t.mes in this burgeoning center of cinema that Lempicka painted this still life.

Although Lempicka’s training in the studios of Maurice Denis and André Lhote familiarized her with the techniques of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, she had long held a deep admiration for Renaissance and Baroque masters, sparked by a trip to Italy with her grandmother when she was barely a teenager. Indeed, the influence of Old Masters is embedded into almost every aspect of the present work.

Lempicka has manipulated the techniques, subject matter and literal likeness of the Old Masters to create a distinctly modern painting. Like her Baroque predecessors, Lempicka used chiaroscuro to create depth in the composition, a tool she often used to conjure a suggestive drama in her other works. Lempicka was a highly technical painter, evidenced in the curtain that hangs down the right side of the composition and the leathery green leaves of the plant in the foreground. The naturalistic depiction of the textures and behaviors of these elements evoke the flowing volumetric drapery in an Italianate fresco or the textiles in a Holbein or Velazquez portrait.

Another element seemingly plucked from an Old Master still life is the glass vase in the foreground, which featured prominently in the vanitas scenes popularized during the Dutch Golden Age. As if these symbols were not enough to cement her connection to the Old Masters, Lempicka pins a reproduction of a Rubens portrait of his brother in the background. While the painting seems harmonious and resolved upon first glance, the scene is precariously balanced and laden with tension. At any moment, the leaves seem like they might droop under their own weight; the curtain seems on the verge of cascading down to the table where it may knock over the glass; the box of cigarettes (or are they matches?) sits so temptingly close to the edge of the table that one expects a hand to reach in and grab them at any moment.

Lempicka proudly believed that she stood out among artists of her day. “I was the first woman who did clear painting—and that was the success of my painting,” she later wrote. “Among a hundred paintings, you could recognize mine. And the galleries began to put.mes in the best rooms, always in the center, because my painting attracted people. It was neat, it was finished” (quoted in Kizette de Lempicka-Foxhall, Passion by Design, New York, 1987, p. 53).