Duncan Grant

Probably acquired directly from the Artist by Raymond Mortimer
Bequeathed by the above to Frances Partridge, London, in 1980 and thence to the present ownership in January 1981

London, A.I.A. Gallery, Fitzroy Street Retrospective, July 1955, cat. no.18.

Richard Shone, The Art of Bloomsbury, Tate Publishing, London, 1999, p.124.

There are vertical surface cracks across the board, which are visible in the catalogue illustration, and the board is slightly warped. There are a few losses to the elements of collage, notably the area visible on the right edge of the bottle on the far right. The collage on the Bulmer's bottle is lifting and the collage on the bottle on the right has been stabalized. There are a few tiny flecks of paint loss and lifting paint to isolated areas across the surface. The work is dirty. There are a few small areas of paint fluorescence across the surface, including a spot to the bottom of the bottle on the right, a few small lines near the lower right corner and a very small area on the lamp stand on the left, which may be small retouchings. Held in a gilt and painted plaster frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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This is the largest of a group of still lifes made by Duncan Grant at Asheham House, Sussex, in the first weeks of War in August and September 1914. All the paintings show a bamboo table bearing an assortment of objects - oil lamp, bottles, cups and saucers - set close to the high flint wall that bordered the paved terrace in front of the house. The mottled and varied texture of this wall forms the background to all the paintings. The present one is a pendant to Vanessa Bell's Triple Alliance, also in oil and collage on board (University of Leeds collection). Since at least early 1914 Grant had made an increasing number of works using collage and papier collé. Triple Alliance is unique in Bell's work for its reference to current European events in the collaged fragments of maps and The Times (of 1st September 1914). Grant's simpler collage elements are drawn directly from the motif - the labels from a bottle of Bulmer's cider, and a piece of painted paper forming the bottle of Apollinaris soda at the right.
It is not known when Grant first used collage in his works but at some point in February/March 1914 he 'stole' from his hotel bedroom in Paris some unused rolls of old-fashioned wallpaper to give to Picasso (whom he came to know at this time through meetings at Gertrude Stein's and a visit to Picasso's studio). The artist had told Grant that he could not find more of the kind of patterned wallpapers that he wished to use in his works of that period. This incident was almost certainly a spur to Grant's own use of collage. This was also encouraged by his designing for the Omega Workshops in 1913-14 but collage does not seem to appear in his studio paintings until early 1914, becoming abundant in 1915, the year in which he exhibited an abstract collage (with wood attachments) at the Vorticist exhibition in London.

The painting was owned by the critic and writer Raymond Mortimer, probably acquired directly from the artist, and it hung in later years at Long Crichel, Dorset, the country house Mortimer shared with Edward Sackville-West, Eardley Knollys and others. He bequeathed the work on his death in 1980 to Frances Partridge. It can be seen above the desk in her London flat in a photograph reproduced on the back of the jacket for her volume of diaries, Hanging On (1990).

We are grateful to Richard Shone for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of this lot.