Flower Table
- Artist: Winifred Nicholson
- Date: 1928–9
- Medium: Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions: support: 1128 x 802 mm
- Museum: Tate Britain
- Collection record: Tate Britain website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
This is the “Flower Table” by Winifred Nicholson. Painted in 1928–29, it’s an oil on canvas that shows pots of brightly coloured flowers wrapped in crisp white tissue paper, set on a plain white table that looks almost like a rustic butcher’s block. The scene comes from the artist’s rural home at Bankshead in Cumberland, where she and her husband Ben lived a simple life after the war.
The light pours across the table, turning the everyday arrangement into something almost mystical—like an altar. Nicholson herself once said the white paper “held the secret of the universe,” and you can see that sense of wonder in the way she layers colour and light. On the surface, tiny silver dots scatter across the canvas, hinting at a higher reality beyond the mundane, a quiet yearning for peace after the First World War.
It’s one of a small group of still lifes Nicholson produced in the late 1920s, all focused on plant pots on a table. The painting was acquired in 1985 with help from the Carroll Donner Bequest. This piece invites you to pause, breathe in the quiet beauty, and notice how a simple table of flowers can speak to the deeper currents of the time.
See it in person
Flower Table is in the collection of Tate Britain on Millbank, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
