This is one of a pair of paintings of the window of Gillies’ cottage in Temple. It was one of the first he painted after evacuating his family there from Edinburgh in 1939 to escape the bombs of war.
The windows in Temple became a mainstay of Gillies’ painting, as a boundary between inside and outside worlds and often one he used to divide figurative and abstract painterly approaches. The vase at the centre is likely one made by his sister Emma. Following her death in 1936, Gillies painted her ceramics into his still lifes in a kind of object based memorial portraiture.