Duncan Grant

Duncan Grant

1885 – 1978

Formal Garden with Windmill and Two Costumed Figures

watercolour, pen and ink, ink wash and pencil on paper

unframed: 26.5 by 21cm.; 10½ by 8¼in.

framed: 40 by 34cm.; 15¾ by 13½in.  

Executed circa 1900.

Gifted from Mrs Angelica Garnett to the present owner 

There exists a fascinating body of very early work by Duncan Grant, much of which survives through the care of his mother Ethel Grant. All are in pencil, pen and watercolour and already show Grant’s spontaneous handling of his medium and his imaginative flourish, fully suggestive of some of his later work. Some of the earliest of the drawings were made in Burma in letters he sent home; later he was influenced by drawings in English illustrated periodicals. His father Bartle Grant had purchased copies of The Yellow Book which his son later enjoyed; the work of Aubrey Beardsley certainly influenced him and is detectable in the present drawing whose subject has not been discovered. It has an eighteenth-century French flavour in the attitude of the figures and the formal garden, although the windmill suggests a rather different note, a refection perhaps of his long winter visit with his mother to Belgium and Holland in 1899-1900. The fullest account of Grant’s juvenilia is in Simon Watney’s monograph on the artist (1990).

Richard Shone