Nude with a Flute

At some point in 1913-14 Grant acquired four tall, narrow wooden panels with framed edges. On them he envisaged a group of paintings that would invest the human figure with exotic fantasy, partly through setting, partly through brilliant, emblematic colour. On one he painted a female nude, standing against an enormous leaf, accompanied by a blue bird (see lot 61), basing the figure on a photograph of Molly MacCarthy taken in early 1914; on another a reclining female nude playing a flute (the present lot); a third in which the same figure is predominantly blue (private collection); the fourth (present whereabouts unknown) bears an unfinished standing nude. The two versions of the nude with flute were modelled by Marjorie Strachey, one of Lytton Strachey's sisters, probably from a photograph taken at Asheham House, Sussex, in 1914. Part of the blue nude, with its owner's dog, is seen in the background of Bell's Flowers in the Studio of 1915 (here lot 63) and shares similarities of colour and handling with Grant's portraits of late 1914/early 1915. The painting, with the nude's awkward leg-splay and the alarmed expression of the dog, is characteristic of Grant's ludic treatment of a classic theme and may owe something to Titian's Danaë (in various versions) and to Piero di Cosimo's Death of Procris (as it was then called; National Gallery, London), a favourite work of Grant's which he later copied. Although not part of an Omega Workshops commission, it is certain that Grant's work there encouraged such comparatively large-scale semi-decorative panels as these. There is a possibility that the flute-playing figure was inspired by the memory of Nijinsky in the ballet L'Après-Midi d'un Faune, which Grant had seen in London in February 1913; the colouristic and gestural freedoms of the Russian Ballet continued to nourish his work throughout the 1913-15 period.

Nude with a Flute (with a study of the mountaineer George Mallory, nude, on the back) was bought by Vivien Leigh in 1964; the three other panels remained in the artist's collection until his death in 1978.

It is worth noting that in 1913-14 Vanessa Bell, with her customary boldness of approach and ability to get her own way, persuaded several friends to pose naked for photographs, alongside ones of herself and her husband Clive Bell. Neither as intimate as those photographs taken by Pierre Bonnard of Marthe (and himself) nor as sportive as those of and by Edvard Munch on the beach, Bell's collection (along with Grant's photographs of Mallory) represents a moment of liberation, specifically in the Bloomsbury milieu and more generally in British cultural life.

R.S.