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Duncan Grant
(1885-1978) The Coffee Table, Asheham1914
Oil on board
19 1/8 x 26 5/8 in. (48.7 x 67.6 cm)
Provenance
The artist;
Richard Shone, UK, gifted from the above 1970;
Piano Nobile, London;
Private collection, U.K., acquired from the above.
Literature
Richard Shone (1993), Bloomsbury Portraits. London: Phaidon, p.126, pl. 97.
Exhibitions
Clare College, Cambridge, ‘Modern British Pictures from Local Collections’, 1971;
The Gallery Edward Harvane, London, ‘A Homage to Duncan Grant’, 1975 [no. 13];
Kiddell Gallery, Sotheby's, London, ‘The Charleston artists : Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and their friends’, 19 December 1984 – 2 January 1985;
Piano Nobile, London, ‘From Omega to Charleston: The Art of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, 1910-1934’, 2018.
The Gallery Edward Harvane, London, ‘A Homage to Duncan Grant’, 1975 [no. 13];
Kiddell Gallery, Sotheby's, London, ‘The Charleston artists : Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and their friends’, 19 December 1984 – 2 January 1985;
Piano Nobile, London, ‘From Omega to Charleston: The Art of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, 1910-1934’, 2018.
On loan from a private collection - Not for sale
“I can well remember Duncan Grant sometimes picking up a familiar object in his studio – a match box, a vase, a book – and looking at it as though he had never seen such a thing before. He de-materialised the object and saw it only in formal, aesthetic terms.” – Richard Shone
We are grateful to Richard Shone for his assistance with this catalogue note.
Painted during the summer of 1914, The Coffee Table, Asheham belongs to a group of still lifes in which Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell explored the same arrangement of everyday objects through their increasingly post-impressionistic style. It was painted at Asheham House, a secluded Regency property in the Sussex Downs which was rented by Bell's sister, Virginia Woolf, and her husband Leonard. Bell and Grant stayed at the house in 1914, painting alongside one another and responding to the same subjects. Among their visitors...
On loan from a private collection - Not for sale
“I can well remember Duncan Grant sometimes picking up a familiar object in his studio – a match box, a vase, a book – and looking at it as though he had never seen such a thing before. He de-materialised the object and saw it only in formal, aesthetic terms.” – Richard Shone
We are grateful to Richard Shone for his assistance with this catalogue note.
Painted during the summer of 1914, The Coffee Table, Asheham belongs to a group of still lifes in which Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell explored the same arrangement of everyday objects through their increasingly post-impressionistic style. It was painted at Asheham House, a secluded Regency property in the Sussex Downs which was rented by Bell's sister, Virginia Woolf, and her husband Leonard. Bell and Grant stayed at the house in 1914, painting alongside one another and responding to the same subjects. Among their visitors that year were Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey, whose presence made Asheham an important centre of Bloomsbury's artistic and intellectual life.
During this Post-Impressionist period, the influence of Cubism is particularly evident in Grant's repeated treatment of this still-life arrangement. Although the objects themselves are commonplace, their shifting perspectives and the interplay of flattened forms reflect his growing familiarity with the work of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Grant returned to this arrangement in several versions, including one incorporating collage, an experimental technique associated with the recent innovations of Picasso and Braque. A related composition, A Still Life, Asheham House is now held by the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery at the University of Leeds, alongside Bell's Triple Alliance, which depicts a strikingly similar arrangement, reflecting their practice of painting alongside one another.
The present painting remained in Grant's possession until 1970, when it was gifted directly from him to the art historian Richard Shone, whose subsequent scholarship has played an important role in establishing the significance of Bloomsbury's contribution to British modernism.
