To view all current artworks for sale visit philipmould.com

This powerful study of Paul Roche was painted by Duncan Grant in 1947 and is a fine example of the artist’s quick, impressionistic style of painting and bold use of colour.

Roche was one of Grant’s closest friends in the latter half of his life and was arguably one of his most important male muses. The pair first met in 1946 outside Piccadilly Circus tube station and remained close friends for the next thirty-two years until Grant’s death in 1978. Roche, who was thirty at the time, started modelling for Grant the day after they met and he later recalled how ‘Though it was the summer, two things I realised as a model: you soon get tired of even the very easy pose… [and] it seems warm but you begin to feel cold.[1]

The present work was painted in 1947, the year after they met, and shows Roche in a pensive, recumbent posture gazing away from the viewer. Life-studies such as this have always played a crucial role within an artist’s oeuvre; the human figure is the most challenging yet rewarding subject to paint due to the complexities of anatomy and the ever-changing play of light and shadow on the skin. Grant has tackled his subject in his characteristically forceful, confident manner with a striking combination of blues, greens and red to describe what others would see in a more simplified range of tones. The figure of Roche blends harmoniously within his surroundings which we presume is Grant’s studio. Roche’s left arm rests on a chair and behind him we see what appears to be a piece of fabric designed and manufactured in the Omega Workshops, which was run by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell between 1913 and 1919.

Grant continued to paint Roche over the next three decades and his early studies of him, such as the present work, paved the way for his monumental likeness of Roche as the figure of Christ for a mural in Lincolnshire cathedral. Painted in bright colours, Christ is shown loosely draped in a landscape with his arms raised holding a lamb around his neck. Grant has reimagined the image of Christ and transformed him from a bearded figure with long hair into a young, dashing man. It is hardly a surprise, therefore, that the mural was considered overly homoerotic by some viewers.

In 1954 Roche married and moved to America and he took up a teaching position at Smith College, Massachusetts. He remained a devoted friend to Grant and in 1961 when Vanessa Bell died, he returned to England with his family to take care of his ageing friend. Grant died in 1978 and five years later, following his divorce, Roche moved to Mallorca where he lived for the rest of his life until his death in 2007.

The present work was kept by Roche until 1983 when it was sold along with the bulk of his art collection. It was subsequently acquired by the art collector John Constable, who also owned a striking portrait of Roche painted by lamplight (previously with Philip Mould & Company).

[1] P. Roche quoted in P. E.H. Davis ‘Painter’s Model and Poet: Paul Roche’, Canvas Issue 23 [Accessed at: https://www.charleston.org.uk/painters-model-and-poet-paul-roche/]