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| Edouard Vuillard Sunlit Interior ca. 1920 distemper on paper, mounted on canvas Tate Gallery |
"The painting represents the artist's mother in her bedroom at Vaucresson near Paris, where, in rented rooms, she passed the summers with her son in the years around 1920. It is painted not in gouache but in distemper, a technique characteristic of Vuillard, to which he became accustomed while painting scenery in his youth for the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre. This technique gave his paintings the freshness and almost unalterable quality of pastel."
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| Vanessa Bell Chrysanthemums 1920 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Bell often painted flowerpieces and frequently used flowers in her interior decorative work. Stylised flowers are a dominant theme in the dust jackets she designed for books written by her sister, Virginia Woolf. Bell rejected the brighter colours she'd used before the war, and in the 1920s and 30s painted flowerpieces and still lifes with rich but sombre colour harmonies. The vase of flowers here is placed on a mirror."
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| William Roberts The Cinema 1920 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Roberts's early work was abstract and he joined Wyndham Lewis's Vorticist group. After the First World War he made a name as the painter of everyday modern scenes. While film had been invented in the late 19th century, it reached new heights of sophistication and popularity in the 1920s, the age of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the rise of Hollywood. Movies were silent until 1927 and were accompanied by live music. Many music halls, traditional places of popular entertainment, were adapted to show films."
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| Winifred Nicholson Window Sill, Lugano 1923- oil on panel Tate Gallery |
"Though the painting of flowers has been stereotyped as the preserve of women artists, Nicholson uses it here not as an expression of femininity, but as a pretext for experiments in technique. Like many progressive artists at this time she adopts a naive or 'primitive' style in an attempt to unlearn traditional picture-making habits and generate a fresh vision of the subject."
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| John Quinton Pringle The Window 1924 oil on canvas Tate, London |
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| Walter Sickert L'Armoire à Glace 1924 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Sickert made sketches for this work in 1922 while he was living and working in Dieppe, but began this painting back in London. The model was Marie Pepin, whom he had employed as a maidservant since 1911. The title prioritises the wardrobe rather than the woman who is seated in the background. Sickert described the scene as 'a sort of study à la Balzac. The little lower middle-class woman . . . sitting by the wardrobe which is her idol and bank, so devised that the overweight of the mirror-door would bring the whole structure down if it were not temporarily held back by a wire.'"
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| Pierre Bonnard Nude Bending Down 1923 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Pierre Bonnard The Bath 1925 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"This is one of a series of paintings that Bonnard made of his wife Marthe in the bath. Though she was in her mid-fifties, the artist depicts her as a young woman. Marthe spent many hours in the bathroom: she may have had tuberculosis, for which water therapy was a popular treatment, or she may have had an obsessive neurosis. The bath, cut off at both ends, and the structure of the wall creates a rigorously geometric composition. The effect is strangely lifeless, and almost tomb-like, as if the painting were a silent expression of sorrow for Marthe's plight."
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| John Lavery King George V and Queen Mary at the Opening of the Modern Foreign and Sargent Galleries at the Tate Gallery 1926 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| John Lavery The Opening of the Modern Foreign and Sargent Galleries at the Tate Gallery 1926 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"The Modern Foreign and Sargent Galleries at the Tate were opened by King George V amid great pomp and ceremony on 26 June 1926. They were financed by Sir Joseph Duveen, director of the Duveen Galleries in New York and son of the celebrated art dealer, J.J. Duveen. Appropriately, the location of the ceremony was one of the Turner Galleries at the Tate, which were presented by Duveen's father. Duveen commissioned the Irish-born artist Sir John Lavery to record the event. Lavery had established a reputation as a society portraitist and was experienced in painting royal occasion of this type. As a leading member of the Glasgow Boys, he was commissioned to record the state visit of Queen Victoria to Glasgow International Exhibition in 1888, and he also painted the Royal Family at Buckingham Palace in 1913. The picture is extremely formal, but executed in Lavery's fluid, easy style."
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| Pierre Roy A Naturalist's Study 1928 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Like several of the Surrealists, with whom he exhibited in 1925, Pierre Roy used a precise style to portray an uncertain reality. A Naturalist's Study alludes to the nineteenth-century concern with scientific classification and order. However, the relationship of these curious objects, including a paper snake and a string of eggs, remains mysterious. The artist's son described this work as portraying a strange motionless world: 'Life seems to have stopped and become fixed like the locomotive itself in front of a chance or imaginary obstacle.'"
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| Margaret Barker Any Morning ca. 1929 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Margaret Barker was interested in charging everyday incidents with extraordinary meaning. The quiet atmosphere in this bedroom interior is established through the ritualised movements of the woman and girl as they make the bed. This stillness is echoed in the painting over the bed, The Courtyard of a House in Delft by Pieter de Hooch (1629-84), which Barker must have seen in the National Gallery, London. The archway in this painting is transformed by Barker into a doorway onto a landing and window. An inscription over the archway translates: 'This is in Saint Jerome's vale, if you wish to repair to patience and meekness. For we must first descend if we wish to be raised.'"
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| Louis Marcoussis Rain 1929 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Marcoussis spent the summer of 1929 at Saint-Servan near Saint-Malo and began at this time to introduce a Breton loaf or loaves into a number of his still lifes. In this picture, a loaf and a wine glass are on a table with a cloth in front of a window, through which one sees a glimpse of a stormy sky with rain falling."
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| Paul Nash Lares 1929-30 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Lares is based on the shape of Nash's fireplace. To the Romans the 'Lares' were protective deities, sometimes worshipped at the crossroads but particularly associated with the home and hearth. Nash brought a further intimacy to this reference by including the tools of his artistic creativity (a T-square and a set-square). This mysterious juxtaposition may owe something to his admiration for the work of Giorgio de Chirico, who had his first London exhibition in late 1928. Nash's new work turned towards Surrealism in the following years."
– quoted passages based on notes by curators at the Tate in London