WG (William Gregory) Grant worked as an accountant and attended evening classes under R Godfrey Rivers at the Brisbane Technical College around 1900. He maintained his painting practice at night, often working from sketches, and painted en plein air alongside his wife Gwendolyn during weekend trips to Redcliffe, Sandgate and Coolum. The pair were energetic members of the Royal Queensland Art Society, being made life members in 1937 and 1965, respectively. He served as trustee of the Queensland National Art Gallery from 1945 until his death in 1951.

From the mid-1940s, Grant concentrated on watercolour, adopting a broad-brush technique and a vivid palette that favoured the modernist colour harmonies of yellow and green. His approach would impress Brisbane’s younger artists, including Joy Roggenkamp, as well as established painters, such as Jon Molvig, who admired Grant’s watercolours in Brisbane prior to moving to the capital. In art critic Gertrude Langer’s review of Grant’s 1954 memorial exhibition at the Queensland National Art Gallery, she observed that his ‘colour harmonies reveal life-enhancing optimism, courage and generosity. Nature is not anxiously copied but joyously experienced by a man of such temperament.’