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Description: | Oil on canvas. Duncan Grant was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, a loose gathering of artists, writers and intellectuals that included Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, the artist and critic Roger Fry, and the economic John Maynard Keynes. 'Still Life, Lime Juice' was probably painted in 1915 (despite being retrospectively dated 1911 by the artist), at a time when Grant was exploring abstraction and assimilating the work of French artists such as Cézanne and Matisse. This painting also reflects Grant's designs for the Omega Workshops, the decorative arts company founded by Roger Fry in 1913. The composition of the scene is flattened and reduced to patches of bright colour; the main motif of the still life is forced to compete for our attention with the brightly coloured table and striped wallpaper.
Propped up in the background, behind the wooden chair, is a landscape painting which is almost lost amid the riot of colour and pattern. This 'painting within a painting' has been identified by art historian Richard Shone as 'By the Estuary' by the prominent Bloomsbury artist Vanessa Bell, the sister of Virginia Woolf and close companion of Duncan Grant. Bell's painting shows the outbuildings of Eleanor House in West Wittering, a village on the Chichester estuary, where Grant and Bell spent the spring of 1915 with other members of the Bloomsbury Group. Later that year, Vanessa Bell rented a house known as The Grange in nearby Bosham, and it was probably here that Grant's 'Still Life, Lime Juice' was painted.
Extract from 'The British Ambassador's Residence Washington DC: Works of Art from the UK Government Art Collection' (London 2004) | Rights holder: | © 1978 Estate of Duncan Grant, courtesy Henrietta Garnett | Subjects: | domestic interior Bloomsbury Group still life wallpaper lime pepper table jug bottle painting | Temporal: | 1915 | Source: | Government Art Collection | Creator: | Duncan Grant | Identifier: | http://www.gac.culture.gov.uk/work.aspx?... | Go to resource |
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