Duncan Grant is the best English painter alive.  And how English he is!  (British, I should say, for he is a Highlander.) Of course, he has been influenced by Cezanne and the modern Frenchmen.  He is of the movement.  Superficially his work may look exotic and odd.  Odd it will certainly look to people unfamiliar with painting.  But anyone who has studied and understood the Italians will see at a glance that Duncan Grant is thoroughly in the great tradition; while he who also knows the work of Wilson, Gainsborough, Crome, Cotman, Constable, and Turner will either deny that there is such a thing as an English tradition or admit that Duncan Grant is in it.  For my part, I am inclined to believe that an English pictorial tradition exists, though assuredly it is a tiny and almost imperceptible rill, to be traced as often, perhaps, through English poetry as through English painting.  At all events, there are national characteristics; and these you will find asserting themselves for good or ill in the work of our better painters.

Duncan Grant’s ancestors are Piero della Francesca, Gainsborough, and the Elizabethan poets.  There is something Greek about him, too; not the archaeological Greek of Germany, nor yet the Graeco-Roman academicism of France, but rather that romantic, sensuous Hellenism of the English literary tradition.  It is, perhaps, most obvious in his early work, where, indeed, all the influences I have named can easily be found.  Then, at the right moment, he plunged headlong into the movement, became the student of Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, though not, curiously enough, of Bonnard, the modern artist with whose work his own has the closest affinity, and, for a year or two, suffered his personality to disappear almost beneath the heavy, fertilizing spate.  He painted French exercises.  He was learning.  He has learnt.  He can now express, not someone else’s ideas, but himself, completely and with delicious ease, in the language of his age.  He is a finished and highly personal modern artist.

I dare say Duncan Grant’s most national characteristic is the ease with which he achieves beauty.  To paint beautifully comes as naturally to him as to speak English does to me.  Almost all English artists of any merit have had this gift, and most of them have turned it to sorry account.  It was so pleasant to please that they tried to do nothing else, so easy to do it that they scampered and gambolled down the hill that ends in mere prettiness.  From this catastrophe Duncan Grant has been saved by a gift which, amongst British painters, is far from common.  He is extremely intelligent.  His intellect is strong enough to keep in hand that most charming and unruly of its sister gifts, sensibility.  And a painter who possesses both sensibility and the intellect to direct it is in a fair way to becoming a master.