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The Bloomsbury Group artists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell were responsible for some of the most exciting and avant-garde art in early twentieth century Britain. This monumental portrait, painted around the time these lifelong partners conceived their first and only child, is an outstanding example of their collaborative dynamism.

Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, where this was painted, became the Bloomsbury Group’s country escape after both artists moved there in the early years of the First World War. By the time ‘The Red Hat’ was painted, Grant and Bell had already embarked on the programme of decorating a large proportion of the available interior surfaces and furniture of their new home. It is painted upon a substantial, thick-panelled board of wood, quite possibly a repurposed door, characteristic of the couple’s resourceful and opportunistic methodology.

Grant’s composition also shows the daring deployment of stylistic and compositional traits inspired by French modernism and the School of Paris. Cézanne’s portrait Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress (1888–90) [fig. 1] also depicts his wife in a red dress; likewise she is seated in a chair set against a pale green interior wall, with an embroidered drapery hanging prominently to one side of the composition. There are also stylistic affinities in the calligraphic depiction of the hands. Cézanne was highly regarded within Grant and Bell’s circle – his paintings dominated the 1910 and 1912 Post-Impressionist exhibitions staged by Roger Fry and contributed to by Bell and Grant – and his artistic theories became intrinsic to Grant’s artistic development. Although it is unlikely that Grant ever saw Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress in person, he may have been aware of it through an illustration included in Ambrose Vollard’s Cezanne published in 1914. The stylised handling of Bell’s eyes, producing a striking emotional detachment, is similar in style to Grant’s exact contemporary, Pablo Picasso, evident in such famous works as Les Deoiselles d’Avignon 1907, and whom Bell described in 1914 ‘as one of the greatest geniuses that has ever lived.’[1]

Although he painted a number of portraits of Bell, this stands out as a work of radical ambition and artistic presence, in which Grant was forging his own language of self-expression as an English post-impressionist. At all times his partner in her creative exploration - as he was with hers - in this highly fused masterwork, Bell is the indivisible collaborator and protagonist. A period of great closeness between the two at this period was also marked by the arrival of their only child, the artist Angelica Garnett, herself a greatly talented and creative woman, who only later life learned that Grant was her father.

[1] V. Bell, Letter. 1914, quoted in ‘Pots et Citron’, Charleston [accessed online 21.09.23] available via: https://www.charleston.org.uk/object/pots-et-citron-copy-of-pablo-picasso/.