Overview

The first ever biography of Duncan Grant - one of the best known names in the British art scene and the most charismatic member or the Bloomsbury set. The life of the painter and designer Duncan Grant spanned great changes in society and art, from Edwardian Britain to the 1970s, from Alma-Tadema to Gilbert and George. This authoritive biography combines an engrossing narrative with an invaluable assessment of Grant's individual achievement and his place within Bloomsbury and in the wider development of British art. 'Spalding's skill is to sketch out the intricate emotional web against the bright bold untouchable figure of the artist. . . Her achievement is to let that sense of a man living with his craft shine through on every page- the result is an exceptionally honest and warm portrait. ' Financial Times

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9780712666404

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Reviews

A full-bodied but strangely affectless biography of the minor English painter and decorative artist. As the Bloomsbury industry continues to expand, it's rapidly running up against the law of diminishing returns. With superior, if not definitive, biographies already in place for all the major figures, only the secondary and tertiary characters are left - though as second-raters go, Grant is near the top of the pile. But his mild artistic abilities will always be overshadowed by whom he knew and whom he slept with. Having already written a biography of Grant's fellow painter and lover, Virginia Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell (1983), Spalding is well qualified to delve into the emotional complexities of Grant's life. Drawing on letters and diaries, she details his affairs with the leading men of Bloomsbury, from Maynard Keynes to Lytton Strachey to Vanessa Bell's brother Adrian Stephen, but the love of his life was Bell. Despite his homosexuality and ongoing affairs and her marriage, they set up house together and had a daughter - who eventually went on to marry one of Grant's former lovers, David Garnett. Such polymorphousness has long attracted biographers to Bloomsbury, but Spalding also spends a judicious amount of time on Grant's art. She believes that log-rolling praise from intimates such as Roger Fry and Kenneth Clark, paradoxically, was largely responsible for Grant's reputation plummeting in his later years. Unquestionably, Grant was a decent copyist and a reasonable colorist with a good sense of line and form, but his style tended to ebb and flow with whatever was in vogue at the time, so that it is hard to pin down anything in his work as definitively Duncan Grant. Spalding's biography suffers from a similar problem. Though she has all the facts, she is never quite able to capture the essence of the man. The only thing missing from these hundreds of exhaustively researched pages is Duncan Grant. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Frances Spalding is an art historian, biographer and critic. Her acclaimed book, Roger Fry- Art and Life, was followed by a biography of Vanessa Bell, which led to an invitation ten years later to write on Duncan Grant. In between she wrote British Art since 1900, Stevie Smith- A Critical Biography and Dance Till the Stars Come Down- A Life of John Minton. She is currently editor of Charleston Magazine.

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