Duncan Grant's Self-Portrait

Image of the day: Scotsman Duncan Grant’s Matisse-esque self-portrait, produced c. 1920. The painting is currently in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland.

Unfortunately, Grant is remembered these days less for his artistic output than for his involvement with the Bloomsbury set. He was the lover of both economist John Maynard Keynes and writer Lytton Strachey, and later became involved with Vanessa Bell – wife of art critic Clive Bell and sister of Virginia Woolf – even fathering a daughter by her. The child, Angelica Bell, turned out to be a chip off the ol’ block: she horrified her parents by marrying David “Bunny” Garnett, her father’s one-time paramour and son of the prolific translator of Russian novels, Constance Garnett. Bunny G was present at the birth of his future wife, and reportedly proclaimed: “I think of marrying it. When she is 20, I shall be 46 – will it be scandalous?”

Now there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy …

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