British painter Duncan Grant produced a portrait of his fellow Bloomsbury Group member and lover, David Garnett. Garnett was a writer and publisher whose first novel under his own name was Lady Into Fox. As conscientious objectors to the war, the two lovers became fruit farmers in 1916, the same year as The Bloody Battle of the Somme. During this time jazz, which was sometimes seen as a rebellious and immoral form, had emerged as a prominent style of music with popular songs such as “Sidewalk Blues” by Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers.
“Wonderful or supernatural events are not so uncommon, rather they are irregular in their incidence. Thus there may not be one marvel to speak of in a century, and then often enough comes a plentiful crop of them; monsters of all sorts swarm suddenly upon the earth, comets blaze in the sky, eclipses frighten nature, meteors fall in rain, while mermaids and sirens beguile, and sea-serpents engulf every passing ship, and terrible cataclysms beset humanity.”
Lady Into Fox by David Garnett
Duncan Grant (1885-1978), Portrait of David Garnett (1916)
