The Baillie Family, after Thomas Gainsborough

Duncan Grant made copies and paraphrases after the Old Masters all his life. The earliest are quite exact transcriptions and include an extremely fine copy (now at Charleston, Sussex) of Piero della Francesca's profile of Federigo da Montefeltro, painted in Florence in the winter of 1904-05. In 1913 he copied a Picasso owned by Roger Fry, as far as is known, his only work made after a living contemporary. Between the wars he produced works after Piero di Cosimo, El Greco, Rembrandt, Delacroix and Renoir, sometimes from reproductions but mostly in front of works in the National Gallery on 'copy days'. Grant had an abiding love for the work of Thomas Gainsborough: after attending a lecture on Gainsborough and British Art given by Roger Fry, he wrote to Fry saying that his praise of the artist had reduced him to tears. The present work was painted at the National Gallery (before the work was transferred to the Tate Gallery) in late 1934, early 1935, in readiness for an exhibition in the spring of 1935 of 'transcriptions' at the Storran Gallery, London, directed by his friend Eardley Knollys.
The Scottish connections of James Baillie, the father pictured by Gainsborough, would not have been lost on Grant who was steeped in Highland history from his youth.

R.S.