Biographies

Simon Albert Bussy (1869 – 1954)

He was born and trained in France but visited England, where he became the teacher of Duncan Grant and the husband of Lytton Strachey’s sister Dorothy; he was thus connected to the Bloomsbury Group. One of his best known paintings is a portrait of Lytton Strachey. He also worked with Roger Fry‘s Omega Workshops. He was a friend of Gide (whom Dorothy loved and translated) and of Malraux, who wrote his last novel at the Bussys’ villa in Roquebrune. Dorothy wrote a lesbian novel, Olivia, in 1930, based on her own experiences in a French school, which the Hogarth Press published eighteen years later.