This portrait depicts the artist Simon Bussy (1870-1954). A close friend and family relation of the portrait’s author Duncan Grant, Bussy married Grant’s cousin Dorothy Strachey in 1903. Bussy was formative in Grant’s development as a painter, providing him in his youth with invaluable advice and later providing useful letters of introduction. Bussy had trained in the École des Beaux-Arts under Gustave Moreau where he forged life-long friendships with Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault. It was through Bussy that Grant came to study with Jacques-Émile Blanche in Paris in 1906-07, and it was also through Bussy that he was able to pay a personally significant visit to Matisse in spring 1911.

Bussy’s own art was a marriage of Symbolist atmosphere, studied naturalism, and a charm akin to that of ‘Douanier’ Rousseau. His most distinguished works included portraits. His treatments of Sir Richard Strachey, James Strachey and George Mallory (all National Portrait Gallery) and Ottoline Morrell (Tate) each have their own individual character. His uniquely flamboyant images of animals are his most famous works, including panthers, frogs, snakes, pelicans, and toucans.

Portraits of friends was a sub-genre which came to define the Bloomsbury Group. Roman à clefs of friends, family and lovers appear in the novels of E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, and Grant, Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry took great pleasure in sitting for each other and in painting their close circle of friends. Definitive examples of this include Grant’s portraits of Ka Cox, Fry’s portrait of E.M. Forster, Bell’s portrait of Fry, and both Grant and Bell’s portraits of Bunny Garnett and Mary Hutchinson. This portrait of Simon Bussy accords with that lineage: the sitter is informally seated, his legs casually crossed over the knee; his attitude is loquacious, his brows lightly arched, his turquoise tie frothy and dandyish.

When it was exhibited in Duncan Grant’s important Wildenstein retrospective in 1964, this portrait of Bussy was incorrectly dated to circa 1950. The dating of 1922-25 suggested by Richard Shone is strongly supported by Bussy’s appearance – a man in the prime of middle age, his moustache still bristling and his hair swept away from the forehead. Bussy’s appearance in contemporary photographs, taken by the hostess Ottoline Morrell at Garsington, correlates closely with this painting of Bussy by Duncan Grant (fig. 1).