Duncan Grant, the painter Bloomsbury loved and forgot to look at

Duncan Grant

Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 21, 1885 Aviemore
Died	May 8, 1978 (93)
Occupation	Painter
Awards	Royal Designer for Industry

Most readers meet Duncan Grant as a character in someone else’s book. He is the beautiful cousin in Lytton Strachey’s letters, a great love of John Maynard Keynes, the painter who moved in with Vanessa Bell, and the father whose daughter was not told who he was. Bloomsbury’s writers described him endlessly. Few spent as long looking at his pictures.

That imbalance is the problem his work still has to argue against. Grant painted canvases, but he also painted doors, bedheads, fireplaces, tables, church walls, dinner plates and the fabric on the chairs, and at Charleston, the Sussex farmhouse he shared with Bell, the house itself became the picture. Critics later used that range to file him under “decorative”. Tate Britain is now putting it at the centre of the story.

Duncan James Corrowr Grant was born on 21 January 1885 at Rothiemurchus, near Aviemore in the Scottish Highlands, the son of an army officer, Major Bartle Grant, and spent much of his early childhood in India and Burma. Sent to school in England, he came to live with his aunt, Lady Strachey, whose household included his cousin Lytton. It was his aunt who persuaded his parents to let him study art. He entered the Westminster School of Art in 1902, copied Masaccio’s frescoes in Florence, studied in Paris at Jacques-Émile Blanche’s Académie de La Palette in 1906 and spent terms at the Slade. In 1909 he called on Matisse.

By then he had found his circle. Living in Fitzroy Square, a few doors from Virginia and Adrian Stephen, he joined them in 1910 in the Dreadnought hoax, disguised in robes and dark make-up as one of a fake Abyssinian royal party touring the Royal Navy’s flagship. The same year Roger Fry’s exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists reached London, and Grant took from Cézanne and Matisse a licence to flatten, simplify and exaggerate. For Fry’s decoration of the Borough Polytechnic dining hall in 1911 he painted Bathing and Football; The Times noted that he had used his draughtsmanship “to represent the act of swimming rather than any individual swimmers”. In 1912 he hung alongside Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh in the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition.

Fry’s Omega Workshops, founded in 1913 with Grant and Bell as co-directors, carried that language onto pots, fans, screens, chairs and wardrobes. His painting went further in the same months. Group at Asheham turned friends into rhythm, and The Mantelpiece, painted beside Bell’s version of the same motif, shows how close their hands had become. His Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound, a scroll of coloured shapes more than four metres long, was meant to be wound past a viewing aperture to music by Bach. It is among the earliest abstract works made in Britain; Tate later reconstructed it in motion.

The war fixed the shape of his life. A conscientious objector, he went to work on a fruit farm in Suffolk in 1916 with his lover David Garnett, and then to Charleston, the farmhouse near Firle that Bell had found. The household that formed there ignored the rules of its time, with Clive Bell, still Vanessa’s husband, arriving for long stays. Angelica, Grant and Bell’s daughter, was born at Christmas 1918 and grew up believing Clive was her father. Grant’s relationships remained mostly with men, but he stayed with Bell until her death, painting in the same studio for decades.

Between the wars his standing was at its height. He had his first solo exhibition at the Carfax Gallery in 1920 and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1926 and 1932. Paintings such as The Hammock traded experiment for a warm, loosened naturalism. With Bell he made the Famous Women Dinner Service for Kenneth Clark between 1932 and 1934, fifty hand-painted plates running from Jane Austen to Cleopatra. The setback came in 1936, when Cunard rejected the panels and fabrics he had designed for the first-class lounge of the RMS Queen Mary. “The company simply said they were not suitable, paid my fee, and that was that,” he recalled.

The case against Grant was made early and it stuck. Wyndham Lewis walked out of the Omega in its first year and turned the quarrel into a public attack on Fry’s circle, and the suspicion that Bloomsbury’s painters were praised mainly by their friends, Fry first and later Clark, followed Grant for decades. After the Second World War his figurative, sensuous painting looked like a period piece beside abstraction and then pop, and his standing fell through the 1950s and 1960s. Some of that criticism is fair: the late easel pictures often repeat the earlier ones. The weaker argument is the one that treats a painted door as a lesser thing than a canvas, which is exactly the hierarchy Grant spent his life ignoring. Recovery began in the late 1960s, as figuration came back.

Public commissions kept coming in the meantime. In 1941 he was made a Royal Designer for Industry for his printed textiles, painted St Paul’s Cathedral during the Blitz for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, and took the lead when Bishop George Bell of Chichester invited the Charleston painters to decorate the small church at Berwick, where Grant painted the Christ in Glory over the chancel arch. For the Russell Chantry in Lincoln Cathedral, unveiled in 1959, he modelled Christ on the poet Paul Roche, his companion since 1946. The chantry was later closed and used as a storeroom for years before it reopened.

The most private part of the work waited longest. In 1959 Grant gave his friend the painter Edward Le Bas a folder of more than four hundred erotic drawings of men, marked “very private”, made when sex between men was still a crime in Britain. Long thought destroyed, they passed through several hands until the theatre designer Norman Coates gave them to Charleston in 2020, and a selection was shown there in Very Private? in 2022. After Bell died in 1961, Grant stayed on at Charleston with Roche’s help. He died on 8 May 1978 at Roche’s home in Aldermaston, aged ninety-three, and is buried beside Bell in the churchyard at Firle.

From 12 November 2026 to 11 April 2027, Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury at Tate Britain gathers more than three hundred works and, for the first time, moves the Charleston studio they shared until 1939 into the museum while the farmhouse is conserved, with Grant’s long-hidden nudes on the walls. What his work argued all along is now in plain view: that the room where people live and love is a fit subject for serious art, and a fit surface for it too.

Tags: art, artists, Bloomsbury Group, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, British art, Charleston, Famous Women Dinner Service, Omega Workshops, Roger Fry

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