Under the Vine

During the Second World War, Duncan Grant was mostly confined to Charleston, the farmhouse he shared with Clive and Vanessa Bell in Sussex. Until that period, paintings by Grant depicting the house and its garden are relatively few but confinement led to an increasing number of works that celebrate the oasis he and Vanessa Bell had created at Charleston during the previous two decades. The present work, painted on a summer afternoon in 1946, shows the Folly, a small walled area leading out of Grant's studio. It was (and still is) a suntrap where the artist cultivated a trellised vine and a figtree. Vanessa Bell, reading, leans against the wall, the studio door just beyond her, the brick path in shadow leading to an outer studio. The painting contains several typical features of Grant's work such as an emphatic vertical towards the edge of a canvas, the move from shade into sunlight and the domestic intimacy of the subject.