‘Regalia’ depicts marine instruments, grouped on a table, beyond which is a terrace overlooking the sea. From left to right the instruments may be identified as follows: compass, surveyor's chain, surveyor's rule, harbour signals chart, inclining sundial, fishing float, vertical sundial, glass net float, portable tachometer and auger. With the exception of the two sundials, which probably date from no later than the eighteenth century, the objects would have been in common use in the 1920s. The large red object, around which is draped a string of cork floats, is a ship's lantern (port) ‘related to the type called Dark Lantern since its light could be shut off by a small door in its side’. She considers that the object identified above as an auger is ‘an instrument for the cleaning of tubes, being a spiral of brass bristles on a metal stem, the tip of which is blunt’. The artist acquired these and similar objects in a number of ways: some were purchased at ships' chandlers, some he found discarded and others were given to him. Mrs von Bethmann-Hollweg no longer possesses any of the instruments depicted.
‘Regalia’ was painted in the artist's studio at Dairy House, Maresfield Park, Sussex in 1928 where he set up the instruments to contrive a still-life composition. Wadsworth was consistent in his practice of painting still-life from the motif but the view of the sea is imaginary. Wadsworth began to paint marine still-lifes in 1926 after a visit to Marseilles.
The subject of the marine still-life was to preoccupy him above all else until 1929 when his work began to move towards biomorphic abstraction. The vocabulary of the marine still-lifes generally includes both the organic and man-made, natural forms, such as shells, and instruments of measurement such as sundials. It was only in 1928 that he abandoned, temporarily, natural forms. The earlier still-lifes were juxtaposed with harbour scenes, thereby forming a link with the paintings of ships in harbour which directly precede these works, but the still-lifes of 1928 are mostly set against an empty or near-empty seascape. In ‘Regalia’ the sea is empty but for a small yacht and a buoy, the only indication of movement in an otherwise motionless scene. In 1926 the notion of setting a still-life before a landscape was becoming popular in England and by 1928 it had become typical of Seven and Five Society painting, notably in the work of David Jones, Ben and Winifred Nicholson and Christopher Wood, as well as in that of Paul Nash who was not a member. It was particularly popular on the Continent where de Chirico, Herbin, Metzinger, Léger, Matisse and Picasso were prominent practitioners, some of whose work Wadsworth knew in reproduction as early as 1921 as a result of his subscription to L'Esprit nouveau, of which he owned six volumes, and to Léonce Rosenberg's Bulletin de L'Effort Moderne, which he subscribed to from January 1924 until December 1927.