We are
grateful to Richard Shone for his assistance with this catalogue note.

Duncan Grant
was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group and one of the British artists
most closely associated with introducing the colour and freedom of European
modernism to Britain.

St Paul’s
Cathedral held a particular fascination for Grant, who returned to the subject
on several occasions. A towering monument of the past, surrounded by an
evolving modern city, it was an irresistible subject for Grant, whose early
success as an artist resulted from his embrace of both the old and new. It
seems, however, that he was a little too focused, and a letter from Vanessa
Bell, now in the Tate Archive, provides a simple instruction: ‘Do finish St
Paul’s … my dear’.[1]

Painted in
1938, the present work belongs to a small but significant group of paintings
depicting the cathedral. It’s large-scale, and the palette of browns, blues and
mauves lends the scene an almost dreamlike quality, with short, choppy strokes
in the foreground imitating the shimmering reflections on the water. It is
arguably the most atmospheric of Grant’s known treatments of the subject.

Three years
after the present work was painted, Grant was commissioned by the War Artists
Advisory Committee, under the directorship of Kenneth Clark, to depict St
Paul’s during the Second World War. Clark acknowledged the artist’s long
engagement with the subject, writing, ‘I know you have painted St Paul’s a
great many times’, before describing the cathedral rising from the
surrounding ruins as though from ‘Pompeii’.[2] Grant’s resulting painting,
now in Imperial War Museums, depicts the dome beyond the exposed cellars and
shattered buildings of the Blitz.[3] The comparison gives the
present work an especially interesting place within the sequence; the 1938
painting records the cathedral within the crowded, functioning riverside city;
the wartime picture, by contrast, presents the same monument newly exposed by
destruction. Grant himself remarked upon the transformed wartime city as
looking ‘like Ancient Rome’.[4]

Such was the
success of this series that the Queen Mother acquired an example, which remains
in the collection at Clarence House today. Another depiction belongs to the
Government Art Collection.[5] The recurrence of the
motif across private, royal and public collections gives some measure of the
importance St Paul’s assumed within Grant’s work.

[1] TGA 20078/1/44/205.

[2] Kenneth Clark to Duncan Grant, 1941,
quoted in Australian War Memorial, ‘Shared Experience: St Paul’s 1941’, Art
and War. Available at: https://www.awm.gov.au/visit/exhibitions/sharedexperience/iwmld_1844 (Accessed: 2 September 2026).

[3] Imperial War Museum, Art.IWM ART LD
1844.

[4] Duncan Grant, (1941) Letter to
Kenneth Clark. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant letters to Kenneth Clark and
Jane Clark, MSS 39, box 1, folder 43. Yale Center for British Art,
Archives, New Haven.

[5] Government Art Collection, 3812.