Footnotes

Provenance
With Crane Kalman Gallery, London, July 1968, where acquired by
Mr and Mrs White
Tom Woodward
With Peter Nahum at The Leicester Galleries, London, 15 November 1997, where acquired by the present owner
Private Collection, Australia

Exhibited
Chichester, The Tudor Room, The Bishop's Palace, All for Love: Aspects of Love in the Art of more than 200 Years, July 1994, cat.no.62

The war period was, for a multitude of reasons, an uneasy time for Duncan Grant. Against the background of national unrest, two major events further clouded his personal life. Virginia Woolf's suicide in 1941 and the unsanctioned marriage between his former lover Bunny Garnett and his daughter Angelica in 1942 were both a source of much consternation.

Artistically much of his energies were disposed to commercial endeavours. He undertook a contract as an Official War Artist, with Vanessa and Quentin Bell he painted frescos for the interior of Berwick Church, and again with Vanessa Bell he painted murals for Devonshire Hill School. Whilst objectively successful, Grant found such commissions challenging and following the war he only embarked on a few such similar endeavours.

As war-time domestic life set in pursuits of travel and socialising, both of which would have otherwise provided solace for Grant, became increasingly untenable. As such these years were, not by choice, of relative seclusion.

In reviewing the output of this period however, there is one clear dependable source of happiness for Grant – Charleston farmhouse. The occasional country home of the Bloomsbury group since 1916, Grant, together with Vanessa and Clive Bell, relocated from London to Charleston at the outbreak of war in 1939, a move that would ultimately prove a permanent one.

Throughout the early 1940s at Charleston Grant painted a series of traditionally composed still-lifes, which together display a sense of the escapism his location offered him. Often sombre in palette they none-the-less relish with glimmers of exuberance and recall his finest paintings of the preceding decades. The present example is arranged with seasonal early summer blooms cut from the Charleston gardens. As is often the case with such works, Grant composes the bouquet alongside drapery to introduce texture to the painting, and includes scant, but tantalising background details. A single fallen poppy petal offers both a note of compositional colour balance and introduces a sense of fleetingness. The vessels Grant employed for these still-lifes were often selected from an arsenal of favourites. In the present composition Grant has purposefully turned the jug's motif away from us to allow for a cool creamy resting point for the eye, which effectively emphasises the dexterity of the surrounding brushwork. The same jug can be identified in a painting of almost 20 years later, The Mediterranean Jug, 1960 (sold in these rooms on 22 November, for £38,100).

We are grateful to Richard Shone for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.