Sir Edward Marsh (1872-1953) known as 'Eddie' was a civil servant, patron and elected buyer and chairman of the Contemporary Art Society (1936-52). He first began buying contemporary British art in 1911 with Duncan Grant’s Parrot Tulips from the Carfax Gallery, St James’s, London (now in Southampton City Art Gallery) and bequeathed his modern collection of 342 works to the CAS. The influence of the French Post-Impressionist painters is evident. Grant would have experienced them at Roger Fry’s first exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries, London in the autumn of 1910. Although Grant had been studying art in Paris in 1906-07 he was yet to embrace the avant-garde, and indeed many of his fellow Bloomsbury Group artists had not either until then.