Duncan Grant
46 1/8 x 30 3/4 in
Bell sat for Grant on several other occasions in this period, and the resulting pictures are among the artist’s most insightful and characteristic. This portrait was painted at Charleston, the Sussex farmhouse that Grant and Bell moved to in 1916. According to the Bloomsbury Group specialist Richard Shone, it is almost certainly the second portrait that Grant painted of her there. The first was painted in 1917. 'Portrait of Vanessa Bell' is painted on a substantial, thick-panelled board of wood. Grant enjoyed using heavy wooden surfaces as the support for his paintings when he first moved to Charleston, and Shone has suggested this portrait was painted on part of a door from the farmhouse.
A number of similarities are apparent between 'Portrait of Vanessa Bell' and Paul Cézanne’s 'Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress'. In both Grant and Cézanne’s paintings, the sitter wears a maroon-coloured dress, set against a pale green interior wall, with an embroidered drapery hanging prominently to one side of the composition. In both works, the characterisation of the sitter is ambivalent and sullen. It is likely that Grant was familiar with Cézanne’s painting, which was available to him through a reproduction in Ambroise Vollard’s illustrated monograph about Cézanne. The French artist’s painting of his wife was perhaps invested with special poignance owing to Grant and Bell’s heightened intimacy at this time: their daughter Angelica was conceived around the time of the painting’s execution. Cézanne was highly regarded by others in Grant and Bell’s circle, including John Maynard Keynes, who purchased Cézanne’s still life of apples from the Degas sale in March 1918, and Roger Fry, who later wrote an influential monograph about the artist.
Provenance
The ArtistRichard Shone, bequeathed by the above, 1978
With Anthony d'Offay, London, 1987
Private Collection, December 1988
Piano Nobile, London, 2023
Exhibitions
1959, London, Tate Gallery, Duncan Grant: A Retrospective Exhibition, May - June 1959, cat. no. 38
1969, Cambridge, Arts Council Gallery; Newcastle upon Tyne, Laing Art Gallery; and Hull, University Art Gallery, Portraits by Duncan Grant, Nov. 1969; Dec. 1969 - Jan. 1970; and Jan. - Feb. 1970, cat. no. 24
1988, New York, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, British Modernist Art 1905-1930, Nov. 1987 - Jan. 1988, cat. no. 134
Literature
British Modernist Art 1905-1930, exh. cat., Hirschl & Adler, 1987, cat. no. 134, p. 134 (illus.)