Lot 45: Vanessa Bell (1879-1961)

Landscape view near Guildford
oil on paper laid on board
21 1/4 x 16 in. (54 x 40.6 cm.)
Painted circa 1910.

Johannesburg, Art Gallery, Bloomsbury Artists at Charleston: Paintings from the Reader's Digest Corporate Collection, November 1992 - February 1993, no. 16., as by Duncan Grant 'Landscape with Manse, Scotland'.

with Anthony d'Offay, London, where purchased by the present owner in August 1982.

Although acquired as a painting by Grant, the attribution should be to Vanessa Bell. Grant did not paint in Scotland after 1909 and stylistically this work is incompatible with his painting of that year or before. It greatly resembles one or two extant works made by Vanessa Bell in 1911 when she was staying outside Guildford at Millmead Cottage, near the river Wey. It can be compared to Virginia and Adrian Stephen on the lawn at The Steps, Playden, now long recognised as a 1911 oil sketch of the Stephens on a visit to their sister Vanessa at Millmead Cottage (see Exhibition catalogue, Vanessa Bell: Paintings and Drawings, London, Anthony d'Offay, 1973, no. 1). In 1910 Roger Fry, whose house Durbins was not far from Millmead Cottage, painted a view of the River Wey with horses beside it and hills behind (see F. Spalding, Roger Fry, 1980, p. 131, pl. 43). The light handling of paint and lively surface are similar to the Stephen painting as well as an oil sketch of the Hog's Back, Guildford, by Vanessa Bell.

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