About this work
presents a tabletop still life arranged with quiet confidence: a blue cup and saucer holds the center, flanked by a banana, a tomato, a folded napkin, and a blooming camellia.
The composition pulses with checkerboard patterning, bold stripes, and flat planes of saturated color — and, in a gesture that lifts it squarely out of conventional still life, three inscribed words: "BON JOUR," "HAH," and the enigmatic "MLEAGNA." These fragments of language are not decorative afterthoughts but load-bearing elements, giving the canvas the feeling of a conversation half-overheard. Formally, the work shares DNA with Hartley's "German Officer" paintings — the same flat areas of intense color, contained within discrete boundaries and laid against solid tonal fields — but where those works ache with grief, *A Nice Time* is looser, almost ebullient.
Painted in New York in 1916 following Hartley's return from war-torn Europe, *A Nice Time* represents a departure from his immediately preceding European work while continuing to develop his long interest in color and his more recently adopted fascination with analytic Cubism.
The painting owes a clear debt to the Synthetic Cubist works of Picasso, and in its flat planes and intense color fields it bridges Hartley's German Officer series and his emerging New York voice.
His close acquaintance with Gertrude Stein in Paris in 1912–13 had already primed him to think of objects and words as interchangeable symbols, and *A Nice Time* carries that literary-visual instinct into a domestic, almost playful register. As with many of Hartley's Cubist works, the symbolism remains personal, mysterious, and partly impenetrable — which is precisely what keeps a viewer looking.
On a wall, this painting rewards proximity. Its medium scale — oil on board, 24 by 20 inches — makes it an intimate object rather than a commanding statement, best suited to a study, a reading room, or a kitchen where ideas are welcome at the table. The palette is vivid enough to anchor a neutral wall without overwhelming it, and the embedded text means there is always something new to notice. It speaks to viewers who like their art with a wit that doesn't announce itself — who prefer coded intelligence over obvious beauty, and who understand that a cup of coffee and a camellia, rendered in the right hands, can hold an entire interior world.
