The Modelling Stand is one of Duncan Grant’s largest and most elaborate collages. It is also one of the first works in which he used papier collé (paper collage), a technique which he learned in Paris from Picasso shortly after its invention by Braque in 1912. This work was made during Grant’s celebrated post-impressionist period (1910-1918), during which he and Vanessa Bell experimented with bright colours, playful imagery and avant-garde Parisian devices. It compares closely with another work of the same construction, The Mantelpiece (1914, Tate Collection) (fig. 1), which also evokes the stylishly cluttered surfaces of a domestic interior. The choice of subject (a modelling stand) may have been inspired by Grant’s visit to the studio of Henri Matisse at Issy-les-Moulineaux in 1911, who was working on Nasturtiums with the Painting "Dance" I (1912, Metropolitan Museum of Art) (fig. 2) at the time – another painting which includes a modelling stand.

The Modelling Stand was possibly made in the workrooms of the Omega Workshops at 33 Fitzroy Square, Bloomsbury. (Duncan Grant stated in 1972 that the closely comparable work, The Mantelpiece, was made in a front room of 46 Gordon Square nearby.) Writing for the seminal ‘Bloomsbury’ exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1999, Richard Shone described the work and summarised its importance.

[This] is one of Grant’s most complex collage-paintings, an elaborate dialogue between the flat surface of the support and spatial depth suggested by contour, between painterly handling and segments of unmodelled colour. It moves rapidly from sharp description (as in the objects towards the front of the stand) to a near-abstract interleaving of elements to the right of the central white bowl. The colour scheme is controlled by the green-striped yellow material that appears at four points above and below the stand.

Grant produced only a small number of representational papier collé works in his career. Many are now in public collections, including Still Life, Asheham House (1914, Burton Gallery, University of Leeds) and Portrait of Vanessa Bell (1915, The Charleston Trust). Grant also made a number of abstract paper collages in 1915, an avant-garde series of small semi-decorative works, but after settling at Charleston in 1916 he made no further collages. The remarkable period of experimentation during which he produced The Modelling Stand lasted no more than two years – an unprecedented, formative and greatly significant moment in British art of the twentieth century.