Duncan Grant

Duncan Grant

1885 – 1978

Firle Village

signed D Grant (lower right)

oil on canvas laid down on board

unframed: 45 by 42cm.; 17¾ by 16 ½in.

framed: 61 by 58cm.; 24 by 22 ¾in.

Executed circa 1965.

Marcus Harrison

Charleston House was Duncan Grant’s semi-permanent residence (he travelled extensively) for over sixty years, and was the site for many of the episodes which have come to colour our understanding of the Bloomsbury Group. Located within the village of Firle in East Sussex it was an area that Grant was therefore intimately familiar with. It was also the site at which his many great skills were most effectively harnessed and allowed to develop.

He was a prodigiously talented artist who grappled with the recurring themes to which he was inexorably drawn. This present work demonstrates, even in this late stage of his career, a great and understated sense of composition, and balance of tones. In his later years, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he returned to many of the themes which had interested in him at the end of the First World War. As well as the grander mythological themes, such Leda and the Swan or the Rape of Europa, his interest in bucolic simplicity and animalier was reinvigorated. Situated as Charleston is within traditional farming country he was never too far removed from this world, and this deep and genuine passion for his subject persisted throughout his life. Despite this integrity to subjects close to his heart he was always interested in absorbing new influences, and even towards the end of his life he begins to adopt new elements from many of the great masters such as Titian and Rembrandt.