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Briskly painted with a confident use of colour, Duncan Grant’s landscapes from the 1930s are amongst the most expressive of his career and are finally beginning to gain the recognition they deserve.
The landscape genre was explored repeatedly by Grant throughout his career, reinterpreting his subject through myriad styles over many decades. Beginning tentatively in the 1910s, a Cezanne-inspired medley of parallel brushstrokes and strong lines dominated his views, which gave way to a softer type of depiction with warmer, naturalistic colours in the 1920s. It was in the south of France, however, amongst the vineyards, scorched trees and rustic buildings, that Grant began to explore the genre with a renewed vigour.
Cassis held particular importance for Grant and the Bloomsbury circle in the late 1920s and 1930s. From 1928, Grant and Vanessa Bell made frequent visits to La Bergère, the house they rented at Fontcreuse, just north of the port of Cassis. Contemporary accounts describe the area as...
Briskly painted with a confident use of colour, Duncan Grant’s landscapes from the 1930s are amongst the most expressive of his career and are finally beginning to gain the recognition they deserve.
The landscape genre was explored repeatedly by Grant throughout his career, reinterpreting his subject through myriad styles over many decades. Beginning tentatively in the 1910s, a Cezanne-inspired medley of parallel brushstrokes and strong lines dominated his views, which gave way to a softer type of depiction with warmer, naturalistic colours in the 1920s. It was in the south of France, however, amongst the vineyards, scorched trees and rustic buildings, that Grant began to explore the genre with a renewed vigour.
Cassis held particular importance for Grant and the Bloomsbury circle in the late 1920s and 1930s. From 1928, Grant and Vanessa Bell made frequent visits to La Bergère, the house they rented at Fontcreuse, just north of the port of Cassis. Contemporary accounts describe the area as surrounded by vineyards and olive groves, and Grant repeatedly painted the nearby farmhouses, cottages and views across the fields towards the Mediterranean.
This composition was painted from the garden of La Bergère, looking across sunlit rooftops towards the rising landscape beyond. The house became a regular haunt for Grant, Bell and their creative coterie, and they returned to this region numerous times throughout the 1930s. They were often accompanied by friends and family, including Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard, and the town became, in effect, a southern extension of Bloomsbury life.
Grant’s southern French landscapes rank amongst the most technically accomplished of his interwar career. For him, Cassis provided the brilliant light that had long attracted modern artists to the South of France. The Bloomsbury artists were deeply engaged with French Post-Impressionism; Roger Fry’s exhibitions and writings had helped introduce the work of Cézanne, Matisse, Van Gogh and others to British audiences, and Grant himself was strongly influenced by the intense colour and formal freedom of French modern painting.
The Tate Archives hold a wealth of photographs documenting Grant and Bell in Cassis, including images of Grant working en plein air, donning a paintbrush and straw hat. In the open air, with no distractions from working life at Charleston, it was here that Grant painted some of his most lyrical landscape works.
