The Muses of Arts and Sciences By Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant | On view at the gallery until 11th October 2024
Currently on view at the gallery are The Studies for The Muses of Arts and Sciences — eight remarkable iconographic panels painted in 1920. They were painted by Bloomsbury Group artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant as preparatory works for a mural for their close friend, John Maynard Keynes. A Fellow of King’s College in Cambridge, Keynes commissioned Bell and Grant to decorate the walls of his rooms at Webb’s Court.
His choice of artists for the commission appears to have been straightforward due to their intimate friendship — the three of them had just returned from a trip to Italy and Keynes was also living part-time at Charleston.
Keynes rented a room at Charleston, in Sussex, from 1916 to 1925 and paid a portion of the rent, helping to financially support his friends and as somewhere to retreat from his public-facing life in London. The finished murals for Keynes, and the preparatory panels presented here, greatly resemble the kinds of high-spirited decorative works Bell and Grant were pioneering — from painting on doors and stencilling fireplaces to resemble marble, to adding Italianate frescos to walls.
In this context it is clear to see how the murals combine Bell and Grant’s irreverence for interior design, surrounding Keynes not only with the muses of science for which he owed his public persona, but also the muses of art that compelled his private life.
The Studies will be on view at the gallery until Friday 11th October after which they will travel to the MK Gallery for their forthcoming exhibition, Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour.
