July 10

Duncan Grant, gay Bloomsbury artist
His daughter married his male lover (not a typo).

Duncan Grant (1885-1978) was a painter and interior designer associated with London’s Bloomsbury Group. He also worked in textile design, theatre and ballet set design, illustration and print-making. As was the case with many of the Bloomsburys, he led an unconventional personal life.

As a young man, he became the lover of his cousin, literary critic and biographer Lytton Strachey. Although he was openly homosexual, for much of his life shared a house in Sussex with a female painter, Vanessa Bell, the sister of Virginia Woolf. For many years Grant was the lover of John Maynard Keynes, the well-known economist. They traveled to Italy, Greece, and Turkey, seeing much that would influence Grant’s artistic style. Many of his paintings are of male nudes, and some depict graphic homosexual acts.

Nudes Conversing:

However, Grant fathered one child with Vanessa Bell, whom they named Angelica. Now here’s the oddest thing. Grant’s daughter Angelica later married writer and publisher David Garnett (1892-1981), who had been one of her father's male lovers. Angelica was led to believe that her father was Clive Bell (to whom Vanessa was married), and she only discovered the truth as an adult. In her memoir, “Deceived with Kindness,” Angelica describes her reaction to marrying her father’s former lover.

I swear I’m not making this up. TV mini-series, anyone?

Pas de Trois:

“No one in this world could help falling in love with him”, wrote one of his soon-to-be-discarded lovers. “To forget him was impossible – he was a ravishing creature”, wrote another.

The last great love of Grant’s life was the poet Paul Roche, whose daughter (actress/artist Mitey Roche) Grant had taught to paint. Grant died of pneumonia in 1978 at the age of ninety-three.

Francis Spalding’s “Duncan Grant: A Biography” is the standard account of his life, which stretched from the Victorian age well into the modern era. It is based on his unpublished memoirs, letters and diaries and meticulously documents Grant’s daily life, his travels and his encounters with notables such as E.M. Forster, Andre Gide and D.H. Lawrence.

Playwright Julia Britton, based in Adelaide, Australia, wrote “The Object of Desire,” a play about the complicated private life of Duncan Grant.

Bathers on the Pond: