Whoever would have thought that a stash of more than 400 gay erotic paintings and drawings, hidden for years under the bed of a retired theatre designer, would have an estimated value of around £2 million?!
Certainly not, I'd imagine, their creator the artist Duncan Grant - despite his fame and notoriety as part of the celebrated and bohemian Bloomsbury Group - living, as he did, through an era when homosexuality in Britain was not merely illegal, but actively persecuted by the Establishment. [He lived long enough to see the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, but even at the time of his death in 1978 it was still against the law if you were under 21, and discrimination against gay people was still rife, especially in the tabloids].
Yet today, as the news that this impressive collection has been donated to the curators of the house where Grant lived - with Vanessa Bell, by whom he had a child, and his lover David "Bunny" Garnett; and later with another partner, Paul Roche - Charleston, it turns out to be the most important single donation to the collection to date.
The media are typically coy about showing the pictures in their entirety, especially Auntie Beeb:
However, for your delectation, here's just a small selection of what joys will be on display once Charleston raises the money to re-open:
I somehow doubt that any of my vintage copies of Vulcan magazine are worth that much.
