This painting is an example of what has become known as Wadsworth's 'magic realism' – a marine still life influenced by a sense of the uncanny inherent in the grouping of disparate objects.

In this painting Wadsworth has depicted, in hallucinatory detail, various sorts of pipes seen against the brightly lit background of a calm sea and cloudless blue sky. The sense of potential movement in these objects, in an otherwise eerily still scene, is accentuated by the vibrant colour of an anaesthetist's tube, which seems to oscillate gently between the upper and lower sections of the painting.

Edward Wadsworth, The Perspective of Idleness II, Estate of Edward Wadsworth 2005. All rights reserved, DACS.