Anne Dangar made an important contribution to the development of Modernism in Sydney, despite living in France for the last three decades of her life. Her correspondence with Grace Crowley and other Australian artists resulted in a fertile exchange of ideas about modern art, and Cubism in particular. Dangar produced the ceramics for which she is best known from 1930 to 1950, while she was a resident at Albert Gleizes’s artist community, Moly-Sabata, at Sablons, near Lyon, France. 

This vessel connects with Gleizes’s theories on Cubism as they related to the ‘translation’ and ‘rotation’ of planes. The geometric motifs that decorate the functional piece are closely aligned with these ideas as Dangar explained, observing that ‘the rhythmic motion of the potter’s wheel . . . was consonant with the teaching of Cubism, in that it was the movement of form and colour that created the picture’.