Anne James explores a display of art by some of our country's literary giants

This exhibition is, in particular, centred on 13 drawings by Duncan Grant, from the collection of his lover Paul Roche, only coming to public view after Roche’s death in 2007, as they formed part of his estate. In his latter years Grant was cared for by Roche and he died at Roche’s home in 2007.

Illustrated here is a dramatic nude drawing believed to have been made in the 1940s. It is classic Grant, presenting as it does a modernist simplification of a muscular male form.

The unusual and almost unnatural arched pose that the figure makes injects a real sense of movement into the gentle harmony of the piece as a whole. This picture and the rest of the series of Grant’s drawings are alive with both intimacy and eroticism, both characteristic of the Bloomsbury Set.

The set were the icons of the Avant Garde in early 20th century London creating a sea change in the way in which artists approached their subject matter.

This exhibition exemplifies this well by the work of Roger Fry that is on show. The seven pieces by him encompass his early work such as the classical wood cut featuring a positively Virgilian rural scene with a man and a goddess framed by a copious grape harvest. And later pieces can be seen that changed both quickly and dramatically after his exposure to the French Post-Impressionists in Paris and his subsequent mounting of the first Impressionist exhibitions in Britain in 1910 and 1913.

At the heart of the Bloomsbury Set were Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, later Bell and Woolf. Vanessa enjoyed a long time creative and semi-marital relationship with Grant. Shown here is Vanessa’s lithograph of their granddaughter Amaryllis, her plump serenity accentuated by the perfectly balanced objects she is clutching in each of her hands. Each piece is beautifully hung and the exhibition as a whole provides both a rare insight into the revolutionary nature of the Bloomsbury Set’s impact on 20th century British art and an opportunity to see work that is rarely seen and that is highly collectable.

The Bloomsbury Set: Life Among the Bohemians
Aidan Meller Gallery, Broad Street, Oxford
Open daily until July 28