Blue and Green Bottles and Oranges

The Yale Center for British Art writes that the artist here, Spencer Gore, was influenced by Paul Cézanne and André Derain in using “bright, undiluted colour and seemingly prosaic subject matter“.

I was stuck in particular by the blue and the orange, which are opposites on the colour wheel (complementary colours). I also used as inspiration the date of the work, circa 1914, the year of Gore’s death from pneumonia, and also the year of the outbreak of WWI.

More of my ekphrastic poetry here. This is free verse. For another use of orange and blue, you can see Vincent van Gogh’s Still Life of Oranges and Lemons here.

after drinking burgundy
during a hotel lunch
on our trip to Paris
you stood and placed
two breakfast oranges
by empty green and blue
wine bottles and said

look at that contrast!
like England
and France
yet we ourselves
are still visible
through allied glass

and what of the green
apples? I thought,
what of treaties?
what of declarations?
but demurred
to your analogy
because what I saw
were the shadows
of a long afternoon ahead

©elsp 2026

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And if the talk of oranges has inspired you, here is a little orange and fennel salad.

Hello!

Blue and Green Bottles and Oranges – A Poem