Duncan Grant valuation
Bloomsbury painter and decorator of everything at Charleston that would hold paint.
Duncan Grant was born in Rothiemurchus in 1885, trained at the Westminster School of Art and in Paris, and was at the centre of the Bloomsbury group — a cousin of Lytton Strachey, a lover of Maynard Keynes, and for fifty years the companion of Vanessa Bell.
What a work by Duncan Grant is worth
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Bio
Duncan Grant was born in Rothiemurchus in 1885, trained at the Westminster School of Art and in Paris, and was at the centre of the Bloomsbury group — a cousin of Lytton Strachey, a lover of Maynard Keynes, and for fifty years the companion of Vanessa Bell. He was a director of Roger Fry's Omega Workshops, and the decorative work is inseparable from the painting: at Charleston in Sussex he and Bell painted the doors, fireplaces, tables, screens and walls of the house itself. The easel pictures are still lifes, portraits, nudes and landscapes handled with Post-Impressionist colour. He died in 1978, at ninety-three.
A long career and a habit of painting on anything to hand means the work appears in many forms: oils on canvas and board, decorated furniture and ceramics, textile and theatre designs, and a very large number of drawings and studies. Attribution against Vanessa Bell is a recurring problem, since they worked side by side on the same subjects and both left unsigned work; Charleston and the estate are the reference. Decorated objects raise a condition question that pictures do not, in that they were used.
At a glance
- Born
- 21 January 1885, Aviemore
- Died
- 8 May 1978, Aldermaston
- Movement
- Bloomsbury Group
More on Wikipedia.
Charleston, the Queen Mary and Lincoln
Between 1932 and 1934 Grant and Vanessa Bell made the Famous Women Dinner Service, fifty plates commissioned by Kenneth Clark. In 1935 he was one of nearly thirty artists chosen to decorate the liner Queen Mary, but Cunard rejected his paintings and fabrics for the first-class lounge once it saw them installed. His murals in the Russell Chantry at Lincoln Cathedral, painted in the late 1950s, were closed off for years and reopened after restoration in the 1990s.
Charleston in Sussex, the house he shared with Bell, is open to the public with its painted rooms. For a work on paper or a decorated object, a link to Charleston or to the Omega Workshops, with its provenance, helps settle attribution between the two artists.
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