Duncan Grant
“…when the Carfax Gallery opens its doors…and invites the cultivated public to look at the paintings of Duncan Grant, that public will have the chance of discovering what has for some time been known to alert critics here and abroad- that at last we have in England a painter whom Europe may have to take seriously.” Clive Bell, 1920.[1]
Duncan Grant was born into an upper-middle class Scottish family in 1885; he spent most of his early life in India where his father’s regiment was stationed.[2] Grant attended St Paul’s in London, and soon after lived with the Strachey family who were his cousins. It was Lady Strachey who persuaded Duncan’s parents to let him study painting; thus the boy entered the Westminster School of Art until 1905 where he was taught by an ex-Slade professor, Mouat Loudan, a Scotsman of French extraction. Afterwards Grant would continue his studies in Paris as well as spending much time copying pictures in leading European museums like the Uffizi advised by such artists as Simon Bussy, an artist who had studied under Moreau in Paris; and who would surprise everyone by marrying Dorothy Strachey in 1902. Also important to Grant was the school in Paris run by Blanche known as “La Palette.” Blanche particularly approved of Grant’s copy of a Chardin still-life which would awaken the artist to the magic of everyday objects. According to Shone, Grant’s “early preferences” were Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, the Sienese and early Florentine painters, Poussin (particularly his drawings) and Chardin. This is an interesting list as it compasses renaissance primitivism (including Byzantine influenced art by way of Siena), classicism and domestic realism. Grant was also living in the moment. In his early career a number of contemporary English artists and intellectuals crossed the Scottish artist’s path: individuals like Wyndham Lewis (who depressed Grant in Paris; both would not meet again until they became Camden Town artists in 1911) and Henry Lamb who introduced the Scot to the Welsh Augustus John living in Paris with his mistress while his wife was dying in hospital. Grant would also visit John’s sister, Gwen who had not yet opted for living a life of complete isolation at Meudon. Grant also developed “a marked preference for elegance, sobriety and formal values in Art.” This can be seen in his portrait of James Strachey (above) which is infused with an air of desinvoltura and languid grace; this might be compared with Lamb’s eccentric portrait of Bloomsbury chieftain, Lytton Strachey. Praised by art luminaries like William Rothenstein and enjoying the lifelong patronage and friendship of Bloomsbury notable Maynard Keynes until the latter’s death in 1946, Grant was soon drawn into the orbit of Vanessa and Clive Bell, “early Bloomsbury,” though he had met Vanessa in 1905.[3] After a trip to Turkey in 1911, Fry would fall in love with Vanessa and they would have a brief affair; but she would soon extricate herself and turn to Grant, but in true Bloomsbury fashion, Clive and Vanessa avoided the vulgarity of a formal divorce preferring the sophisticated way of loving.
[1] Quoted in Harrison, English Art and Modernism, 149.
[2] Much of what follows is based on Richard Shone’s Bloomsbury Portraits: Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and their Circle ( Phaidon, 1976).
[3] Though some see the heyday of Bloomsbury as the 1920s and 30s with the group ending with the death of Lytton Strachey in 1932, Shone (Bloomsbury Portraits, 15) dates its beginnings to 1910, the “private Bloomsbury” which only became more public after hitting the headlines after the war.
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