Margaret Mellis was an important figure in the story of St Ives, though her artwork is often overlooked. Known for her collages and constructions in the 1930s and 1940s, the break-up of her marriage to Adrian Stokes and subsequent marriage to Francis Davison with the move to Suffolk in 1948, resulted in a dramatic change in her work: ‘I couldn’t even go on with what I was doing, so I went right back to the beginning of where I left off representational painting. I started over again’. The early 1950s saw a series of still-life compositions in which colour remained central to her working and her former abstract tendencies are still evident. Here, the use of the window obscures the foreground-background distinction and the deliberately arbitrary use of colour allows for Mellis to subtly distort the subject matter.