Duncan GRANT

When she was in her early twenties Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell’s daughter Angelica developed a romantic attachment to the much older David Garnett, who had been Grant’s lover at one time, and in due course the two were married. (Both of her parents disapproved of the relationship, however, and were not invited to the wedding.) David and Angelica Garnett had four daughters, the youngest of whom were the twins Nerissa and Frances, known as Fanny. As a schoolfriend later recalled, ‘The twins were total tomboys without a vestige of femininity. The minute they got home they’d change out of their school uniform into trousers. When I asked [their elder sister] Amaryllis what they wore to parties, she said, “They have masses and masses of new trousers.” No girl in those days ever wore trousers or jeans to parties but being Garnetts, they were given special dispensation in many areas. The twins were also into martial arts, then very new in the West and Nerissa once broke a school record for throwing the discus, the only Garnett who showed a vestige of sporting prowess. Because the twins had each other, they had less need to make friends with other girls, and kept much to themselves.’

As children, the four Garnett sisters all spent time at Charleston, and sat for paintings and drawings by both Bell and Grant. As Grant’s biographer has written, ‘Still more welcome at Charleston were the grandchildren. Duncan shared Vanessa’s delight in their different characters and unexpected behaviour…They were no trouble to look after, as they spent much of the day reading and were often taken for a walk by Clive [Bell] after tea. Later on it pleased Duncan that one of the twins, Nerissa, showed a talent for painting.’ The present sheet is a portrait of Nerissa Garnett (1946-2004), who would grow up to be a painter, photographer and ceramicist after studying at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and was drawn sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s. (It was at around this time that the sitter’s mother noted that the fourteen-year old twins Fanny and Nerissa ‘take eight-and-a-half shoes, and will be terrifying young women if they continue to practise judo.’) Nerissa is here depicted sitting on a 1930s bentwood chair in Grant’s studio; the chair, one of two purchased by Virginia Woolf from the furniture store Heal’s in London and given by her to her sister Vanessa Bell, remains at Charleston today.

A painted portrait by Grant of a slightly older Nerissa Garnett, wearing a white shirt and trousers and seated in an armchair with her arms crossed, was painted at Charleston in 1965 and still hangs in Vanessa Bell’s bedroom there.