Duncan Grant

Duncan Grant (born January 21, 1885, Rothiemurchus, Inverness, Scotland—died May 8, 1978, Aldermaston, Berkshire, England) was an innovative British Post-Impressionist painter and designer. He was one of the first English artists to assimilate the influence of Paul Cézanne and the Fauves.

The son of a military officer, Grant spent several years of his youth in India and was educated at St. Paul’s School, London (1899–1901). Between 1902 and 1907 he studied at the Westminster School of Art and traveled in Italy and in France, where he studied with the French painter and writer Jacques-Émile Blanche in 1906 and met Henri Matisse in 1909.

As a cousin of Lytton Strachey, Grant was introduced to the Bloomsbury group, the members of which became his lifelong friends. 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).

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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.