By the 1920s Léger, like Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, was applying rational and geometic rules to his canvases in an effort to free his pictures of poetic and ornamental detail: "The purist feature which emerges from the purification of standard forms is not a copy but an original form, the aim of which is to materialise the object in all its generality and invariability ... One could make illustionist art, an art of fashion composed of the unexpected and ornamental conventions. Purism, however, is striving towards an art based upon visual invariables, disencumbered of convention, which appeals primarily to the universal properties of the mind and senses". (Ch. E. Jeanneret and A. Ozenfant, Le Purisme, Prague, 1922.)

Léger especially developed the Purist esprit in his still-lives executed between 1922 and 1925. This still-life is a perfect example of Léger's works of this period: the objects, table and background are perfectly locked into a rigorous structure, the composition consists of manufactured objects and the success of the whole relies on a careful balance of black and pure colours.