The first painting is from her Asheham House – Bloomsbury days. Virgina Woolf, Lytonn Strachey, Roger Fry, Meynard Keynes… Bloomsbury was a meeting of minds & personalities. Literary, social, artistic & economic questioning & creativity to create one of Britain’s most brilliant schools of painting . A sense of communal purpose… and a disffusion of Modernism into English speaking countries( Roger Fry acquired many avant-garde paintings for various New York museums in his role as advisor).

The second painting is witness to the great friendship between Grant & Bell. They felt free in each other’s company. They painted together. When we look at the exuberance of this ‘colourist’ style of painting, we must try & remember it in it’s Modernist context. Whilst such a style of painting may be relatively wide spread nowadays, when it was painted it was breakthrough stuff. More composed & assured than the french fauvists of 1907 but more vibrant, colourful & freer in handling than most post-cubist work elsewhere of the 1920’s