Duncan Grant RA RWA


DUNCAN GRANT RWA Date of Birth: 21st. January 1885; † 9th. May 1978 Place: Rothiemurches, Inverness, Scotland Profession: illustrator/Painter click on the image to view the larger version

Duncan Grant was born the son of an Army Major in Scotland in 1885. Consequently as was typical of such children of the Empire at the time, prolonged periods of his early childhood were played out in the dying days of the Raj in India and Burma. He was to return to England by the summer of 1894 as his parents wished him to attend school. Grant 's interest in conventional study was limited, but art classes were a different matter entirely. Following praise from his art teacher, his somewhat eccentric but doting aunt Lady Strachey, hired tutors to give young Duncan private drawing lessons. Despite the only to be expected Victorian fears of slack morality and impecunity, he was at length permitted and even encouraged to follow his chosen path of becoming an artist. His father's fervent desire for Duncan to follow his lead with a career in the Army dashed, he was admitted into Westminster School of Art in 1902. Grant's artistically minded cousins the Stracheys, with whom he had spent long summer holidays as a schoolboy, played an important part in his life beyond his Aunt's hiring of personal tutors. He spent the summer of 1905 with Lytton Strachey, and around the same time Pippa Strachey took Duncan to a meeting of the Friday Club where he first met the 'Bloomsbury artists' and his eventual partner, Vanessa Bell. He studied with Jacques-Emile Blanche in Paris in 1906, and later at the Slade School of Art. Grant moved to 21 Fitzroy Square in 1909 and thereafter became a regular at Virginia (later Woolf) and Adrian Stephen's Thursday evening gatherings. Sharing with Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell a commitment to the decorative arts as well as to painting on canvas, he became the co-director of the Omega Workshops in 1913. By all accounts a handsome, kind and charming person, his lovers included Adrian Stephen, Maynard Keynes and David Garnett; he was also courted by his cousin Lytton Strachey. Though his sexual orientation remained homosexual throughout his life, he was the father of Vanessa Bell's daughter Angelica, and lived for many years at Charleston farm with the Bell family. "He 'got away with things'. Driving our little car along the Strand, its engine stalled. Duncan got out and cranked it up with the starting handle, not without effect: he just managed to leap out of its way and run alongside as it proceeded slowly down the Strand, its doors shut, finally ramming into a majestic Daimler emerging from the Savoy. The innocent victim was naturally enraged. If the culprit had been you or I this is where the story might become unpleasant. Not for Duncan. The injured party at once became his friend; it is said even that it ended with his giving Duncan a commission for a portrait." Quentin Bell, from Bloomsbury Recalled (1995) In 1911 Grant worked on his first major commission. Along with other artists he collaborated on a series of murals for the refectory of Borough Polytechnic (now South Bank University) in south London. His two panels Bathing and Football are in the Tate Gallery, London. The panel Bathing shows the progress of a naked man diving, swimming, and climbing into a boat, as if it were a series of photographic exposures. The art critic of The Times thought that the mural could have a "degenerative influence on the children of the working classes". Duncan Grant lived with Vanessa Bell for many happy and creative years at their home at Charleston, an old farmhouse and in itself an icon of the Bloomsbury Group near Firle in Sussex, where they collaborated on a wide number of projects. Grant achieved an international reputation of being a leader of the English Post-Impressionists and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Royal College of Art in 1970. He died at the home of the model and friend Paul Roche at Aldermaston in 1978 after a proplonged illness. Click here to return to the members' list