Glass has no colour of its own; it takes whatever colour the world around it offers and gives it back changed. The vase at the centre of this canvas is called green, and green is what you see, yet the glass itself may well be clear, and its colour gathered rather than owned. The cream of the sky lies along its lip; the blues of the drapery run down into its stem; a warm amber glows at its heart, where the fruit behind it shows through; and the darkness on the right of the picture folds into the foot. The stillest object on the canvas therefore carries a record of the whole painting, because everything in the picture passes through the glass. And what the picture holds is surprising, for although a still life is meant to be the quietest kind of painting there is, this one is full of rough water.

The white surface on which the vase stands is not quite a tablecloth. It has no table beneath it and no visible edge; it swells and billows, whitening on its crests and turning blue in its hollows, so that it looks less like linen than like sea foam or the sunlit upper surface of a cloud. Behind thevase, a blue drapery climbs in ridged folds, its powder blue laid over depths of near-black, and at the left of the picture, it descends in a dark and gathering mass, like a wave at the moment of turning over. The white surface rushes up to meet it: two bodies of water, one bright and one nearly black, close upon each other in the foreground of a still life, and spray seems to hang in the air where the hem of a cloth should be. On the right, the darkness deepens further, into umber and iron grey, and shuts that side of the picture like a cliff. A vase of glass could hardly have been given a less reassuring place to stand.

At the upper left, however, the picture opens. Beyond the collision of the two waters, through the gap that the drapery leaves, lies a distant coast: a band of olive-green land, a band of sea blue, and a cream sky that turns faintly rose. This is a horizon inside a still life, and the genre is not supposed to contain one, because still life is the art of the near, of things within reach on a surface you could touch. Orlik has folded the far distance into it, and the near and the far exchange their natures where they meet: the distant sea lies flat and calm while the nearby cloth surges, so that the storm is indoors, on a table that is not really a table at all, and the calm weather is miles away. On the horizon itself sit two clouds, grey-rose against the cream sky, flat at the base and lobed at the crown, and risen into almost identical mushroom shapes, so alike that one might be the reflection of the other. They stand to either side of a channel of light and face each other across it. Clouds seldom come in matched and facing pairs, however, and the painting has placed this pair exactly where the distant view narrows to its smallest point, so that whatever these two shapes are, they are what the whole opening exists to show.

Orlik was about eighteen when he painted this, and he had chosen the hardest problem the genre can pose. Oil paint is opaque, while glass is known chiefly for what it lets through; to paint clear glass is therefore to make a material that covers describe a material that reveals. The young hand passes the test with patience rather than display. Each lobe of the scalloped rim is lit separately; the swelling body carries its lights in long streaks; and the domed foot is worked facet by facet, so that every facet holds its own tone, umber beside green beside a last cold grey. The vase itself is a familiar sort of object, its lines looping and drawn from plant stems in the style fashionable around 1900, the kind of vase that stood in a front room rather than a museum. What he asks of it is not familiar at all.

Still lifes built from these same elements have been painted before, and the company shows how strange this one is. Zurbarán's Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633; Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena) lays its fruit in darkness and silence, where it can be everything because the world around it has been stilled to nothing; Orlik keeps the lemon and the orange but lets the world back in behind them, with its coastline, its sky, and whatever is waiting on its horizon. Cézanne, too, let cloth behave like country: in Still Life with Apples and Peaches (c. 1905; National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1959.15.1) the drapery heaves up behind the fruit like rising ground, until the tabletop itself begins to tilt towards landscape. But Cézanne keeps the table, and his turbulence ends at a wooden edge, inside a room. Orlik removes the room altogether: there is no furniture anywhere on this canvas, no ledge, no board, no wall, and his still life stands directly upon the weather. And where Morandi, the twentieth century's other great keeper of vessels, drained the world away from his bottles until little remained but their quiet attention to one another (Still Life, 1946; Tate, N05782), Orlik lets the whole world flood in, sky, sea and rough water together, through a vase with nothing in it.

The best company for this picture, however, is Orlik's own later work, which answers it from both ends of his career. The orange has an afterlife, for it hangs, a decade later, in the small fruiting tree of End of an Affair (c. 1975–1979), and the orange behind this vase is the first of that line. In the mature acrylic paintings, the exchange between cloth and country runs in the opposite direction: the terrains of Totem (1980–1984) and its companions rise and fold like fabric, whereas here the fabric behaves like the sea. That exchange began on this canvas and was never afterwards given up; nor was the matched pair, for The Parting (c. 1975–1978) sets two thin white walls face to face across a divide and bridges them with a plaited rope of hair, while in Eroded Castle (1980–1984) two cones lean toward one another at the summit. On this horizon, the pairing appears for the first time, and nothing bridges it; only the channel of light holds the two clouds apart or holds them back.

The clouds are nearly identical, mushroom-shaped, and may be more than weather. A painter of eighteen in the mid-1960s, setting such a pair face to face above a calm sea, could hardly have kept the other cloud of his age out of them: the rising, flat-topped shape that every newspaper of his adolescence had printed. The canvas itself does not say, and the claim must remain a suggestion, because a resemblance is not the same as an intention. Even so, the reading has support of two kinds. Within a decade Orlik would paint The Lying Plant (c. 1970–1975), in which a dancing figure and a mushroom cloud share a single body, so that a cloud which doubles as something else already has a documented place in his work. And he answered the underlying question himself in later life. Asked whether his technique derived from an awareness of the atom bomb, he replied that 'although the post-war generations are innately aware of the atom-bomb, by treating each shape as if it were a world in itself, I wish to affirm its existence… Not its transience but the strength of its existence.' Set that sentence beside the vase, and the picture sharpens rather than darkens. If the two clouds are only clouds, this is a beautiful still life with strange weather in it. If they are the other thing, then the painting has placed its one breakable object, a vessel of glass, thin-walled and empty, between you and the age, and has shown it standing.