Portrait of John Maynard Keynes by Duncan Grant, 1917
The beautiful science
Maev Kennedy
TU 24 Nov 2005 12.31 GMT First published on Thu 24 Nov 2005
12.31 GMT
Portrait of John Maynard Keynes by Duncan Grant, 1917
Shh, he's working on
how to finance Britain's role in the first world war... portrait of John
Maynard Keynes by Duncan Grant
The chap in the frivolous hat, looking as if he's
considering nothing more taxing than replanting the herbaceous border and
possibly lunch, is the great economist John Maynard Keynes - painted in 1917 by
his lover, Duncan Grant.
The beautiful and tender portrait shows Keynes working (on
how to finance Britain's role in the first world war, according to his
daughter) in the garden of Charleston farmhouse, country bolthole of the
Bloomsbury group, of which he was undoubtedly the most wildly improbable
member.
The painting will be displayed for the first time at the
Sussex farmhouse, where it hung for years after his death. It has been
withdrawn from auction and bought by the Charleston Trust, which now runs the
house as a museum, after just six weeks of frantic fundraising.
The trust raised £100,000 to keep it from auction, with
major grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund charity.
Keynes died in 1946, aged 63, said to have been worn out by
overwork. Grant, arguably the nicest of the Bloomsburies and certainly the best
artist, outlived almost all his friends, working on at Charleston until 1978.
After his death the house was opened as a museum. The trust maintains it as a
shrine to the jaw-dropping interior decor tastes of the Bloomsburies, and has
restored the garden.
Grant kept the painting until 1956, when a London dealer
contacted him for a client who wanted a portrait of the much photographed,
rarely painted economist. Alastair Upton, director of the trust, said:
"Portrait of John Maynard Keynes is quite simply a wonderful painting by an
artist at the height of his powers, that also tells an extremely powerful
story."
Keynes, regarded as one of the greatest and most original
economists of all time, is still revered by many contemporary money men: he
argued for interventionism, warning against hoping things would sort themselves
out in the long run - "in the long run we are all dead" - and
directly influenced the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank.
He was also the oddest member of the tangle of writers and
artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. Grant kept the painting in his studio
long after his lover stunned the Bloomsburies by outing himself as bisexual, if
not straight. Keynes turned up at Charleston in 1925 with his new wife, the
Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, a member of Diaghilev's famous Ballets Russes
company. The Bloomsburies relished being shocking, but were quite shockable
themselves, and thought her habit of dancing naked in the dawn fields beyond
the pale. Millions of art lovers have walked over her: she appears as the muse
Terpsichore in the mosaics by her friend Boris Anrep halfway up the main stairs
of the National Gallery in London.
Keynes was friends with most of the gang, including Virginia
Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, their long-suffering spouses, Leonard Woolf
and Clive Bell, the painter and critic Roger Fry and the essayist Lytton
Strachey, as well as the society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell - lover of
Bertrand Russell - and the painter Walter Sickert. Sickert was recently accused
by the American crime writer Patricia Cornwell of being the true Jack the
Ripper.
Despite spending most of his life with Treasury mandarins,
Keynes was intensely interested in the arts. After attending the Versailles
peace talks after the first world war, he made his name with a small book
mainly written at Charleston, Economic Consequences of the Peace, correctly
predicting the dire implications of the punitive settlement. His 1936 tome The
General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was an academic and political
sensation, and became a bestseller.
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