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Duncan Grant - A Brief Biography

(11 Mar 2005)
Scottish born artist Duncan Grant spent his early childhood in India and Burma where his father was a serving army officer. Grant showed no interest in an intended military career and was eventually allowed, in 1902, to study at Westminster School of Art. Later he studied in Paris with Jacques- Emile Blanche and was introduced to Matisse whose influence can sometimes be discerned in Grant's work.

Through his cousins, the Stracheys, Grant became intimately involved with the leading personalities of the Bloomsbury Group of artists and writers in London. Important members of the group included Virginia Woolf the writer; her sister Vanessa Bell, the painter; Lytton Strachey the writer and historian; Roger Fry the influential art critic and artist and Maynard Keynes the economist. Grant formed a lifelong partnership with Vanessa Bell [their daughter Angelica Garnett became an artist and writer] and also had a homosexual relationship with Maynard Keynes.

In his painting Grant was influenced by post-impressionism, particularly by Cezanne, which work was first seen in Britain at Roger Fry's ground breaking exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists in 1910/11. Grant personally exhibited six works at Fry's Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912/13.

During the Great War [1914-18] Grant was a pacifist and eventually recognised as a conscientious objector and allowed to work as an agricultural worker in Suffolk. In 1916 Grant and Vanessa Bell moved to an old farmhouse called Charleston in Sussex where they remained for the rest of their lives and the house became a rural retreat for the Bloomsbury Group.

From the time of his first one-man exhibition in 1920 Grant continued to exhibit regularly during his lifetime. During the 1920s his work characteristically dealt with geometric, solid forms very probably inspired by Cezanne. Also from the 1920s Grant and Bell spent long periods in the south of France and he painted landscapes, interiors and still-lifes in a broadly post-impressionist style.

Grant was an Official War Artist in the Second World War and together with Bell decorated the interior of Berwick Church in Sussex. In 1959, on a larger scale he was commissioned to make decorative panels for a chantry at Lincoln Cathedral and he continued to be artistically active until the 1970s.