Childhood
Grant was born on 21 January 1885 to Major Bartle Grant and Ethel Isabel McNeil in Rothiemurchus, Aviemore, Scotland. Between 1887 and 1894 the family lived in India and Burma, returning

Grant is best known for his painting style, which developed in the wake of French post-impressionist exhibitions mounted in London in 1910. He often worked with, and was influenced by, another member of the group, art critic and artist Roger Fry. As well as painting

In Grant's later years, his lover, the poet Paul Roche (1916–2007), whom he had known since 1946, took care of him and enabled Grant to maintain his accustomed way of life at Charleston

• Mémoires de Duncan Grant, un Highlander à Bloomsbury by Christian Soleil (2011), Monpetitéditeur, Paris.
• Mémoires de Duncan

Bloomsbury Foundations
In November 1909, Grant moved to 21 Fitzroy Square, where he occupied two rooms on the second floor

Grant's early affairs were exclusively homosexual. His lovers included his cousin, the writer Lytton Strachey, the future politician

• Duncan Grant is referenced with Isadora Duncan and Mary Garden in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) by Hugh MacDiarmid (lines 30–32).