"Grant was a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group"
Duncan Grant was born in Inverness-shire, Scotland. He took up painting encouraged by the French painter Simon Bussy, and went to Westminster School of Art in 1902. He then studied for a Paris before retuning to London to spend a term at the Slade before setting up his own studio in Fitzroy Square in London.
Grant was a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group, which included Lytton Stratchey, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Virginia and Leonard Woolf and finally Vanessa (Virginia's sister) and Clive Bell.
Grant was a director of the Omega workshop form 1913, the workshop made furniture, pottery and textiles designed by Clive and Vanessa Bell alongside other young artists. In 1919 after the workshop closed, Grant and Vanessa Bell moved to Charleston in Sussex, they were pretty much a couple by this time and had a daughter Angelica in 1918.
Grant exhibited at the New English Arts Club from 1909 and the Friday Club (founded by Vanessa Bell) from 1910. He became a member of the Camden Town Group in 1911. In 1913 he exhibited with the Grafton Group, whose members included Fry, Bell and Wyndham Lewis. Influenced by the works of the Fauves and Cézanne in the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1910-11,
Grant contributed to its successor in 1912. He participated in the Twentieth-Century Art show at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 1914. He became a member of the London Group in 1919. His first solo show was held at the Carfax Gallery in 1920. He was a member of the London Artists' Association from 1929 to 1931.
He was represented at the Venice Biennale in 1926 and 1932, and his work was included in the Coronation Exhibition of Contemporary British Artists at Agnew and Sons, London, in 1937. He designed sets and costumes for various theatrical productions. A retrospective of Grant's work was held in 1959 at the Tate Gallery, with subsequent Arts Council tour. He was given a retrospective at Wildenstein & Co., Ltd., London in 1964, a two-person show with Bell at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, in 1966, an Arts Council tour in 1969, and solo shows at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London, in 1972 and 1975. In 1975, in honour of his ninetieth birthday, exhibitions were held at the Tate Gallery and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
(source Tate Gallery)