Duncan Grant

Interior at Gordon Square

c.1915

© The estate of Duncan Grant

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In Tate Modern

In the Studio: Studio Practice

Free entry

Artist: Duncan Grant 1885–1978
Medium: Oil paint on wood
Dimensions: Support: 400 x 321 mm
frame: 450 x 370 x 50 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Purchased 1969
Reference: T01143

Display caption

The Bloomsbury artists often focused their attention on their immediate surroundings, painting their friends engaged in such activities as painting, reading or writing, as well as the objects and furnishings (often home-made) in their rooms. This painting shows the view between the front and back rooms on the first floor of 46 Gordon Square in London, where Grant lived for a time with Vanessa Bell; the front room was her studio. The composition shows that Grant was familiar with recent developments in France such as cubism.

Gallery label, October 2016

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Catalogue entry

Duncan Grant b. 1885
T01143 INTERIOR AT GORDON SQUARE circa 1915 Not inscribed.
Oil on panel, 15¾×12⅝ (40×32).
Purchased from the artist (Knapping Fund) 1969.

The artist told the compiler (conversation of 30 September 1969, of which he subsequently approved this account) that T01143 was painted in about 1915. It is a view, painted from an inner room, of the first-floor drawing room at 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, which overlooked the square and trees. A long sofa (designed by Vanessa Bell) on which is a cushion, is seen through the doorway, with two windows beyond, one in the centre of the picture and one at the right. To the right immediately through the door are seen what are possibly the overlapping backs of paintings stacked against the near wall of the drawing room. T01143 was painted on the spot but the exact appearances of objects were deliberately altered in an attempt to give an impression of the space as it seemed to the artist. Shortly before painting T01143, Duncan Grant had made a careful copy of a recent Picasso which Roger Fry had just bought, ‘Head of a Man’ 1913 (oil and charcoal on paper, 24½×18¼ ins, Zervos II 431). He felt that this involvement might have influenced the appearance of T01143. The illusion of planes overlapping in space is common to both works.

When T01143 was complete, Duncan Grant wanted to do a larger version and as it already existed as a painting he used the design as the basis for a collage of painted and cut paper and one cut-out canvas fragment, on board 30½×25½ ins (coll: Hon Jacob Rothschild). The papers were cut from rolls already painted by the artist which he had available for various uses. The collage follows the design of the painting fairly closely, but the colours are different. In T01143 the artist had attempted to make each painted shape very definite and distinct; one aim of using collage in the larger version was to accentuate this quality.

Shortly after painting T01143, Duncan Grant executed at least one entirely non-representational painting close in idiom to T01143. Now entitled ‘The White Jug’ (Exh. Duncan Grant and his World, Wildenstein, 1964 (30), where dated 1914; this should have read ‘c. 1916’), it was an entirely rectilinear design on panel, 41×16½ ins, conceived and completed as an abstract painting. Some five years later, the artist painted a white jug, lemon and small decorative passages over the lower quarter of the panel but most of the original scheme survives.

Published in:
The Tate Gallery 1968-70, London 1970