Duncan Grant
1885 – 1978
David Garnett

oil, pencil and pastel on canvas
unframed: 54 by 63cm.; 21 ¼ by 25in.
framed: 78.5 by 69.5cm.; 31 by 27 ¼ in.
Executed in 1915.

Agnew & Sons, London
Private Collection

London, Tate Gallery, The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, 4 November 1999 – 30 January 2000, no. 37, illustrated in the exh. cat. p. 106, with tour to The Huntington, San Marino and Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven

Richard Shone, The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Tate Gallery Publishing London, 1999, no. 37, illustrated p. 106
Richard Shone, Bloomsbury Portraits, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and their circle, Phaidon, Oxford, 1976, no. 96, illustrated p. 156
Douglas Blair Turnbaugh, Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group, Lyle Stuart Inc., New Jersey, 1987, no. 45, illustrated pl. 19

David Garnett, known to his friends and family as ‘Bunny’, was part of the original household at Charleston with Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. He was a writer, most known for his novel ‘Lady into Fox’ and the slightly later ‘Aspects of Love’ (1955). Both Bell and Garnett were involved romantically with Grant at the time, and these interrelations characterised the bohemian and open spirit of the Bloomsbury group (Bunny later married Grant and Bell’s daughter Angelica).

This portrait reveals a strapping, chiselled and assured version of the writer, a view from the lens of his lover Grant, where his masculine aspects are very much emphasised. At the time of this portrait, Garnett was 23 years old, and he was a young man in search of a career. Born to celebrated critic and translator parents, Garnett was well versed in writing, reading as well as many other hobbies, and he kept in good societal and literary circles. He was predominantly heterosexual, and his affair lasted with Grant for around four years, while he was still in his first marriage to the illustrator Ray Marshall.

Grant and Bell both painted Garnett at the same time in this sitting at Eleanor House in West Wittering. While Grant’s sexual attraction via his presentation of a very masculine form is hereto present in this work, Bell depicts a different viewpoint: one of a younger boy, not a man, from a side on angle, insinuating a someone who is not commanding a room, but rather the opposite, someone gentle and pensive. Bell’s version is now in the National Portrait Gallery in London and has been well exhibited and published. Grant’s version is in a Private Collection and much less seen in public, making it a great addition to the current exhibition.