Duncan Grant

Self Portrait, 1920, National Gallery of Scotland.

Duncan James Corrowr Grant (21 January 1885 - 8 May 1978) was a Scottish painter and member of the Bloomsbury Group. He is a cousin of John Grant, Lord Huntingtower, being a grandson of the second Sir John Peter Grant. Aside from his promisquous relationships with other members of the Bloomsbury group, he is probably best known for his painting, in which, he is said to be the first to emulate the works of French painters, Paul Cézanne and the Fauves in his own work. This style of painting still holds popularity in England due to Grant, as it implores "brilliant colour aggressively applied straight from the paint tubes to create a sense of an explosion on the canvas". Duncan Grant died on May 8, 1978, in Aldermaston, Berkshire, England is was burried in Sussex, England.

Life

Duncan Grant was born in Rothiemurchus near Inverness, Scotland to a military officer, and his wife. Throughout his childhood, he studied art in various schools, including Slade School. He also spent some of his years as a boy in India, and, upon return to England, continued to study art at St. Paul's School in London, from 1899 to 1901. For the next five years, he attended school at the Westminster School of Art, and then, after he finished schooling in England, he traveled abroad, where he studied in Italy and France. During this time, he met two individuals who greatly influeneced his painting style and overall work as an artist. In 1906, he met and apprentised for French painter and writer, Jacques-Émile Blanche, and then in 1909, Duncan met Henri Matisse as well.

After this time, he was introduced to a group of people named the Bloomsbury group, whom he bacame life long friends with. His cousin, who was also rumored to be his lover at one time, Lytton Strachey, introduced him to the Bloomsburys, associating with them himself. In 1910, one of Duncan's paintings in a post-impressionist exhibition mounted in London became increasingly popular, and affirmed his connection to Roger Fry of the Bloomsbury group, who was also an artist.

He joined the Camden Town Group in 1911, contributed to the Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1912 that was organized by the influential art critic Roger Fry, and participated in Fry's Omega Workshops (1913–19). After Roger Fry founded the Omega workshops in 1913, Grant became co-director with Vanessa Bell. Although Grant had been an active homosexual, his relationship with Vanessa Bell blossomed and he lived with her and her two sons by her husband Clive Bell from before the start of the First World War. In 1916 they moved to the house named Charleston near Firle in Sussex. Duncan and Vanessa painted in Charleston and decorated the house itself with their paintings, and Clive stayed with them for long periods fairly often — sometimes accompanied by his own mistress, Mary Hutchinson.

Living with Vanessa was apparently no impediment to Duncan's relationships with men, either before or after Angelica was born. (Angelica grew up believing that Clive Bell was her father; she bore his surname and his behaviour toward her never indicated otherwise). Duncan and Vanessa had an open relationship, although she herself apparently never took advantage of this after settling down with him and giving birth to their daughter. He was the great love of her life and she understood that if she was to keep him at Charleston with her she would have to allow him this freedom. The pain this decision cost her is related in Angelica's memoir, Deceived With Kindness. Duncan, in contrast, had many purely physical affairs and several serious relationships with other men such as George Bergen.

In 1919 Grant joined the London Group, and his painting changed from abstraction to the careful translation of nature in still lifes and landscapes. He had his first one-man show in London in 1920, and in 1922 he began a collaboration with Vanessa Bell in interior design. He represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1926, 1932, and 1940.

After World War II, Grant's fame subsided, but a revival of interest in his work began with a retrospective exhibition in 1959 and a one-man show in New York City in 1975. Among his best-known works are portraits of his Bloomsbury associates (e.g., a portrait of Virginia Woolf in 1911). He enjoyed an enduring relationship with Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell, with whom he had a daughter, Angelica, in 1918. During the years between the wars, they adopted a similar manner in their painting, loosely reflecting the influence of the Post-Impressionist aesthetic.

Although it is generally assumed that Duncan's sexual relations with Vanessa ended in the months before their daughter Angelica was born (Christmas, 1918), they continued to live together until Vanessa's death in 1961, with Duncan staying on at Charleston until shortly before his own death in 1978.

Grant worked with, and was influenced by, another member of the group, Roger Fry, who was also a former lover of Vanessa's. As well as painting landscapes and portraits, Fry designed textiles and ceramics.

In Grant's later years, the poet Paul Roche, whom he had known since 1946, went to considerable effort in looking after him. Grant eventually died in Roche's home in 1978.

In 1946, at the age of 60, he met the young Paul Roche, who was to be the main love of his late life and a serious threat to Vanessa. His work in the immediate post war period was considered unfashionable, but he continued working, mainly on decorative projects and private commissions. In the 1960s and 70s however, his reputation revived and he continued painting and pursuing young men with a remarkable degree of success until his death at the age of ninety-three. Duncan Grant is buried beside Vanessa Bell in the churchyard of St. Peter's Church, West Firle, East Sussex.

Works

He lived with the painter Vanessa Bell from about 1914 and worked with her on decorative projects, such as those at the Omega Workshops. Later works, such as Snow Scene (1921), show great fluency and a subtle use of colour.

Legacy

Grant is assured of his place in British art history as an innovator of great talent, as an accomplished decorator, and as a painter of large though unequal achievement. At his best, he orchestrates a subtle, often mellifluous and sonorous arrangement of colours and forms, frequently weaving into his work allusions to other artists within the western European tradition of which he was a proud and sensitive inheritor. As a man he was distinguished by great personal beauty and an uncommon sweetness of character; no one who met him could fail to be impressed by his gentle dignity and his faintly ironical vivacity. His enthusiastic generosity as a critic of other artists' work derived from a firm conviction that, of all human activities, painting is the best.

Color Plates

• Maynard Keynes, 1908
• Lemon Grass, 1910
• South of France, 1922
• Football, 1911
• Portrait of Katherine Cox, 1915
• The Baptism, 1919
• Les Femmes Sarantes, 1930
• Portrait of Ethel Grant, 1930
• St Paul's Cathedral, 1941
• Vanessa Bell, 1942

Black and White Plates

• Ethel Grant, 1909
• Lady Strachey, 1909
• Crime and Punishment, 1909
• James Strachey, 1910
• Adrian Stephen, 1910
• Man with a Greyhound, 1911
• Dancers, 1912
• The Queen of Sheba, 1912
• The Tub, 1912-1913
• Vanessa Bell at Asheham, 1917
• The Birds, 1924
• Angus Davidson, 1924
• Duncan Grant mantel design, 1924-1932
• The Flower Gatherers, 1935
• Decorations for the Queen Mary, 1935-1937
• Seguidilla, 1937
• The Bathers, 1926
• Angelica, 1930
• Granada, 1936

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Spalding, Frances: Duncan Grant, A Biography. New York, New York: Randon House, New Ed edition, July 6, 1998. ISBN 0712666400.

• Shone, Richard and Richard Morphet: The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant Princeton University Press, December 26, 2001. ISBN 0691095140.

• Turnbaugh, Douglas Blair: Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group. Published personally by L. Stuart, October 1987. ISBN 0818404426.

External links

• Duncan Grant Art Encyclopedia Retrieved August 29, 2007.

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography about Duncan Grant Retrieved August 29, 2007.

• Roger Fry Biography Retrieved August 29, 2007.

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