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Lot Essay
At King's College, Cambridge, John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) occupied the same set of rooms in Webb's Court for over thirty-five years. In 1910 he commissioned his friend Duncan Grant to paint a mural on part of the main wall of his sitting room. This was one of Grant's first large-scale works, a four-part painting of grapepickers at left and right with a circle of dancers in between. Echoes of Grant's devotion to Piero della Francesca blended with contemporary French influences. By 1911 he had still not finished the work to his satisfaction (years later, he remembered throwing his brush to the floor in tears of frustration); and by 1920 he had no objection to the mural being hidden beneath a new scheme of decoration, undertaken by Vanessa Bell and himself. This covered the length of the main wall, divided by a bookcase. The muses of the arts and sciences was the ostensible subject, with four near life-size figures by each artist, the males by Grant, the females by Bell. The eight studies offered here are preliminary to the large canvases painted in the summer of 1920 in a temporary studio (an army hut) just outside the walled garden at Charleston. The decorations are still in situ at King's College, with Grant's earlier mural under the right-hand panels.
Earlier in 1920 Grant, Bell and Keynes had spent a month or more in Italy, mostly in Rome and then in Florence. Renewed contact with Italian Renaissance fresco painting certainly influenced these decorations - in colour, figurative pose and the marbling that forms the background of each panel, partly emulating the marbling found in many Italian church interiors. Grant greatly admired Andrea del Castagno's frescos in Sant' Apollonia in Florence, particularly the figure of Boccaccio. These had considerable impact when he and bell came to design the Keynes murals. But perhaps more directly influential was an illustrated article published in 1919 in The Burlington Magazine on two paintings of saints by Bono da Ferrara then owned by the collector Henry Harris who had had a room in his London house decorated by the Omega Workshops. The two Italian paintings are startlingly similar in conception to the Keynes murals - the figures also stand with their individual attributes, are strongly contoured and surrounded by freely painted marbling. Grant is known to have drawn inspiration from illustrations in the Burlington (often sent to Charleston by Roger Fry) and this is almost certainly the case here.
The whole room was eventually finished in 1922 with the addition of large appliqué curtains by Bell and several pieces of furniture upholstered in Omega fabrics.
The sketches have a lively spontaneity which is somewhat lost in the more careful treatment and fully realised volumes of the final decorations whose muted colour was very much in accord with aspects of the rappel à l'ordre of the post-War years.
R.S.
Earlier in 1920 Grant, Bell and Keynes had spent a month or more in Italy, mostly in Rome and then in Florence. Renewed contact with Italian Renaissance fresco painting certainly influenced these decorations - in colour, figurative pose and the marbling that forms the background of each panel, partly emulating the marbling found in many Italian church interiors. Grant greatly admired Andrea del Castagno's frescos in Sant' Apollonia in Florence, particularly the figure of Boccaccio. These had considerable impact when he and bell came to design the Keynes murals. But perhaps more directly influential was an illustrated article published in 1919 in The Burlington Magazine on two paintings of saints by Bono da Ferrara then owned by the collector Henry Harris who had had a room in his London house decorated by the Omega Workshops. The two Italian paintings are startlingly similar in conception to the Keynes murals - the figures also stand with their individual attributes, are strongly contoured and surrounded by freely painted marbling. Grant is known to have drawn inspiration from illustrations in the Burlington (often sent to Charleston by Roger Fry) and this is almost certainly the case here.
The whole room was eventually finished in 1922 with the addition of large appliqué curtains by Bell and several pieces of furniture upholstered in Omega fabrics.
The sketches have a lively spontaneity which is somewhat lost in the more careful treatment and fully realised volumes of the final decorations whose muted colour was very much in accord with aspects of the rappel à l'ordre of the post-War years.
R.S.