DUNCAN GRANT

Summary

When Jane asked me to say a few words at this Conference banquet, my first reaction was panic. Cold, blind, suffocating panic—what to say without repeating myself? I scratched my head and tried to think of a connection between Bloomsbury and Scotland. Surely Leonard and Virginia had visited Scotland. They had travelled in France, Germany and Italy and elsewhere. I am grateful to my wife Jean [Moorcrof t Wilson] for pointing out that briefand inauspicious visit they paid in 1938, when they drove up through England to Midlothian, stopping at Dryburgh in Berwickshire, to see Sir Walter Scott's grave.

They were unlucky with the weather. It was early summer, June, but the winds raged. They drove on in stages to Loch Ness and the Isle of Skye, where they stayed three days, continuing their tour by Spean Bridge and Ben Nevis. At Oban, the torrential rain determined them to abandon Scotland. Not a feel-good story.

I thought about the imaginary Hebridean lighthouse, in To the Lighthouse, but, no, that seemed too nebulous for this occasion. Then inspiration struck. Why had I not thought of the sole Scotsman in the Bloomsbury group; a member of old Bloomsbury— the Bloomsbury of Brunswick Square and Fitzroy Square—and an artist who remained for more than two decades one of Britain's most celebrated painters? Kenneth Clark linked his name with Matthew Smith, as artists who “created their own world through the joy of the senses.” Someone about whom Virginia Woolf seriously considered writing a biography. Dear, charming Duncan. Pat Rosenbaum remarked that “one of the various definitions of Bloomsbury is that of a group of men and women who were all in love with Duncan Grant.”

Duncan was born in the Scottish Highlands, at The Doune, the Grant's family house, at Rothiemurchus, in Inverness-shire. His father was a Major in the Indian Army and his mother, Ethel, is described as “a penniless Scottish girl of great beauty.” The Grants were fearless warriors of Norman origin going back to the 13th century. Duncan was descended from John Grant, 4th Laird of Freuchie, Chiefof Grant, an eminent figure in the time of Queen Elizabeth I.