On loan from a private collection.

We are grateful to Richard Shone for his assistance with this catalogue note.
This double-sided early work by Duncan Grant was painted at an important transitional moment. Although academic in conception – a nude model is a well-established, conventional theme, - the seated male figure on the obverse is captured in emphatic, colourful tones, foreshadowing the striking works from the following decade.
An appointment diary Grant kept during 1908-1909 mentions a paid male model who posed in his studio at 19 Belgrave Road, Pimlico, late in 1908 and again from November 1909 at 21 Fitzroy Square. It seems likely that the the standing nude on the reverse was painted first in 1908, with the more dynamic seated nude undertaken the following year.
During this period, Grant painted a number of portraits which have come to symbolise his early efforts at formalised figure painting. One such work, a portrait of Lytton Strachey (Tate, London), painted slightly earlier than the present example, shows a similarly assured approach in areas, but with less daring use of colour. Away from a formal setting, and painting solely for study and self-improvement in private, we see here a less cautious artist who uses tones of greens and mauves to describe flesh and long, sweeping lines to draw contours.
Recently returned from Paris, where he had studied at Jacques-Emile Blanche’s school, La Palette, Grant’s work at this date was well-formed and, at times, imaginative, but it was only later, after Fry’s first Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1910, that he began to truly push against the boundaries of British art.