“These Drawings Are Very Private” — Duncan Grant
NSFW Artist of the Bloomsbury Set, Charleston, England
Duncan Grant, born in Aviemore (Scotland) in 1885, was an artist and designer, a founder of Omega Workshops with Vanessa Bell (1913).
He was a core member of ‘The Bloomsbury Group’, a circle of artists, designers, writers and other intellectuals — including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, David Garnett, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry and John Maynard Keynes.
Relationships within the group were complex and in a seemingly constant state of flux, yet seemed to always manage to keep a cohesive and productive artistic ‘Set’ with a close knit core. Duncan Grant had an extremely close relationship with Vanessa Bell, lived at Charleston with her family and was actually the father of Bell’s daughter, Angelica. He lived at Charleston with the Bell family for over forty years, working and creating with Vanessa Bell constantly, despite the fact that his regard for her was never as intensely romantic as hers for him.
Grant was always openly (with friends) and actively gay. He is known to have been involved with many of the other men associated with the Bloomsbury Group and other artists; (his cousin) Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, David Garnett and Paul Roche (who took care of him in his later years) among…
