Painted in oil on canvas and nearly monochromatic, the allegorical composition depicts two headless nudes in a mysterious setting amid still life elements.
In November 1933 Dickinson decided to put aside his large painting Woodland Scene, which he had been unable to bring to a satisfactory resolution, and began a new painting—his largest—that he eventually gave the neutral name of Composition with Still Life.
"[4] Mitchell Kahan recognized in this work, as in other paintings by Dickinson, "an iconography of concealment," created by showing only parts of things, blurring boundaries, and obscuring relationships.
think I should call it 'The Flying Dutchman,'" the name of the legendary ship doomed to sail forever with its crew of dead men, despite the fact that the imagery does not support that specific subject.
[8] Ward agrees with other writers about the strong sense of death created by the headless figures, the denuded trees, the horizontal vases, the ruined steps and railing descending into darkness, the spiral object, used to circulate water, but lying useless, and a form suggesting a broken bone in the right foreground.
Ward suggests that Composition with Still Life is the Dickinson work most explicitly presented as a dream through the combination of solid, detailed forms with passages that melt into gaseous substances or dissolve into one another.
"[12] Ward points out that this painting was the one most closely connected to his life, being begun on the anniversary of the date he became romantically involved with his wife-to-be and just prior to which he had his father baptize his son in the studio.