Paris Bridge depicts the southern arches of the Pont Neuf in Paris, which connects the Île de la Cité to the Left Bank. Boats are moored on the banks of the Seine. The buildings pictured along Quai des Orfèvres include the public prosecutor’s office, the Tribunal de Paris. Above the roofline can be seen the spire of Sainte-Chapelle and, to the right of it, the western towers of Notre Dame de Paris. Grant visited Paris in the winter of 1935, and he made at least one other painting during his trip. It depicts Place du Furstemberg, a very short distance from Pont Neuf, and the painting was previously owned by the celebrated actor Richard Attenborough (fig. 1). Both subjects were a short walk from the Right Bank hotel where he usually stayed, l’Hotel de l’Univers et du Portugal at 10 rue Croix des Petits Champs. Grant was much occupied in 1935 with Cunard’s commission for large decorative murals aboard their ocean liner RMS Queen Mary, a project that caused him considerable difficulty when the company rejected his scheme. By contrast to that large and complex work, Paris Bridge is a freely handled, freshly painted study from life. It is executed with directness and simplicity and was evidently made with close regard for the subject. The Pont Neuf was a favoured Parisian motif of Grant’s, and he made other paintings of it in 1921, 1947 (fig. 1), 1951 and 1957. Paris Bridge was painted on an artist’s board the reverse of which bears the bright pink stamp of a Paris-based firm of art suppliers: The Paris American Art Co., 425 Boulevard du Montparnasse and 2, rue Bonaparte, Paris. Grant likely acquired the board during the same sojourn in which he made the painting.










This painting was offered for sale by one of Grant’s London dealers, Alex. Reid & Lefevre, which held a solo exhibition of his work in May 1934. Their label is affixed to the backboard, which provides the painting’s title (‘Paris Bridge’), and another smaller label bears a handwritten inscription with a stock number and price (3789, £30). The painting was purchased by the art historian Kenneth Clark, a friend of Grant’s who had only recently been appointed Director of the National Gallery. Clark wrote a catalogue preface for Drawings by Duncan Grant at Thomas Agnew’s in 1933. He acquired a number of pictures by Grant and his partner Vanessa Bell over the years, and he wrote about Grant and Bell in his autobiography Another Part of the Woods (1974). Paris Bridge illustrates that quality of Grant’s work that appealed to Clark, as he explained in a review of Grant’s 1933 exhibition: ‘Duncan Grant’s vision is so instinctively chromatic that he can build up a passage of modelling with strokes of pure colour, each one of which falls perfectly into its place.’ In Paris Bridge the houses above Pont Neuf are each painted a different colour, mixed on the palette and applied with a clean brush, and by these colour contrasts alone, as Clark described, Grant suggested a variety of tones, textures and materials.

Clark and his wife Jane (née Martin) gave this painting to Jane’s brother Kenneth Martin and his new wife Edith. The gift was most likely made on the occasion of Kenneth and Edith’s wedding, which took place around 1938. The painting has remained in the Martin family since that time until it was acquired by Piano Nobile in 2025.