Born in Scotland, Duncan Grant spent much of his youth in India. Upon returning to Britain in 1893, he took up painting at the Westminster School of Art. He travelled regularly through Europe throughout his life after studying in Paris with Jacques-Émile Blanche. In the years that follow he would meet Matisse and visit Picasso's studio. In London, Grant became a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, working in textiles, interior decoration, ceramics, murals, illustration and theatre design. Taking inspiration from the Old Masters as well as contemporary art, his growing success paralleled the general acceptance of modern art in Britain between the wars spearheaded by his friend Roger Fry. Grant eventually represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1926 and 1932, and his paintings have since been collected by museums across the world. He inspired great affection in those whom he met, as a compassionate, charming, gentle and humorous man. Although he was actively homosexual, his longest union was with Vanessa Bell, with whom he lived and worked for nearly half a century, both in London and in Charleston, their country home in Sussex. Mary Hutchinson (née Barnes; 1889-1977) was a cousin of Duncan Grant and the Strachey children. She married the barrister St John Hutchinson and together they entertained artists and writers of an older generation such as Henry Tonks and George Moore. Between 1915 and the late 1920s, she was the mistress of Clive Bell who encouraged her interest in contemporary art and literature. She patronised the Omega Workshops, owned paintings by Gertler and Grant, Marchand, Derain and Matisse, and commissioned decorative schemes from Grant and Bell for her home in Hammersmith and subsequently in Albert Gate, Regent's Park. She was an intimate friend of Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot and, later, Samuel Beckett. Her own book of sketches and stories, Fugitive Pieces, was published by the Hogarth Press in 1927. Relations between Mary and Bloomsbury in general were not always easy; she lived in a much more upholstered and socially luxurious world; and unlike, say, Vanessa Bell, she was fashionably dressed and perfectly poised in any social situation. Four known portraits of Mary Hutchinson were begun by Grant, only one of which - the present work - was completed and signed and dated many years later having been in the collection of John Maynard Keynes. Grant and Bell first painted her at 46 Gordon Square when she posed against a rectilinear abstract work or wall painting. Bell records in a letter that Grant had to begin again, dissatisfied with his first canvas. There was a further attempt, followed by this painting. She sat again for the painters at Charleston in 1917 and Grant may have continued with this present version, more fluently painted than his earlier attempts and somewhat kinder in its portrayal. It contrasts strongly with Bell's 1915 painting, a vivid but unflattering image that is one of her outstanding early works (Tate). It was not uncommon for Bell and Grant, occasionally with Roger Fry, to work side-by-side during the mid-1910s and for both of them to produce multiple iterations of the same subject. Mary St John Hutchinson was evidently a sitter who intrigued them, presumably both for her physical appearance and her character, as well as the frisson generated by the complex relationships between the trio. Grant depicts Mrs Hutchinson from the opposite side to Bell's two versions, but the background is instantly recognisable as the same with its abstract blocks of colour. Sitting upright, with her hair pinned at the nape of her neck and a long necklace, Mrs Hutchinson seems every inch the well-bred and well-mannered society lady. The blues and greens of her outfit are echoed in touches of similar tones across her face and neck, even at the point at which her upper and lower lips meet. Her somewhat sunken eyes look with disinterested neutrality off to the side, but her appearance is composed, dignified, saturated in the aloof assurance of a woman in command of her surroundings.