This outstanding painting was one of the stars of Grant’s first one-person exhibition held at the Carfax Gallery, London, in February 1920. It was mentioned in most of the reviews of the exhibition and was brought by Lytton Strachey. Its evolution is unclear and it may well have been started before Grant visited a circus at Dartford, Kent, in early autumn 1919 which he had greatly enjoyed: ‘It was enchantingly traditional with clowns and exquisite horses and jugglers’, he wrote to Vanessa Bell shortly afterwards. In October he listed ‘Acrobat and Juggler’ as one of the paintings he had to finish for his Carfax show. As was established in two known preliminary drawings (fig. XX), the picture is divided into two, Grant having no intention of recreating a realistic spatial setting. The girl on the tightrope is shown indoors whereas the juggler, standing on a platform, seems to be outside with the suggestion of an early Italian Renaissance landscape way beyond his legs. A central column is decorated with colours used elsewhere in the work. Grant’s lyrical and sometimes fantastic conceptions were often tethered to reality by pictorial devices such as the curtains seen here and in his Venus and Adonis (Tate) of the same period. It is worth remembering that in November 1919, when Grant was finishing the painting, he had attended the London première of the Russian Ballet’s Parade with its characters drawn from the music hall and the circus, including a male and female acrobat in tight, spangled costumes. [Richard Shone]