If Grosvenor Square has been mostly unconnected with the art of painting, it can certainly boast one inhabitant who was an illustrious exponent of writing, as the great Lord Lytton once resided in No. 12 on the north side of the Square.
It was in that house (which was different to the No. 12 later occupied by J. Pierpont Morgan, Esq., with its early Georgian front and its characteristic pillar supports), his last residence in London, that the novelist wrote The Coming Race - perhaps not the greatest, but certainly one of the most brilliant of his many works.
He spent the last five years of his life in Grosvenor Square, having arrived there in 1868, two years after he had been raised to the peerage. He died in 1873 at Torquay, his funeral taking place from his London residence.