These two paintings [the other is The Artist's Wife, Seated, Reading], which remained with the artist and his wife throughout their lives, are somewhere between genre paintings and portraits. The setting for both is the artist’s home Lower Nash End, Bisley in Gloucestershire, where the Gardiners moved in 1934, the year of the Daybed painting. While remaining a purely figurative painter, Gardiner delighted in applying thick impasto, often in pure colours, and had a remarkable ability to capture, in abstract gestures, both natural and artificial light, and the play of reflected light and shadows. (http://www.lissfineart.com/567sub0_159.htm)