Robert Finlayson regularly returned to painting still lifes, saying they were a test of technical skills. In the 1960s subjects were generally in groups, often of household or studio objects such as vases, bottles, statues, books etc, sometimes with one or two pieces of fruit or vegetables. There were also some of single subjects like a vase of flowers. Later, while he still sometimes painted eclectic groupings, he did many paintings which featured just one type of vegetable or fruit. He would choose what to paint from what was available in the house rather than seeking out particular subjects.
Some works are more classical still lifes like this one, while others merge into abstractions of how we perceive and how we express what we see, and how subjects are connected to the space they inhabit. The two approaches come together in United Fruit, which, as a sketch, was originally entitled Still Life on the Move and annotated "Duality (movement out of stillness)" and with an arrow right to left above the sketch "Gradually diminishing out of form".
