Clive and Vanessa Bell

Prominent members of the Bloomsbury Group, a loose collective of artists, writers, and intellectuals, the artist and interior designer Vanessa (born Stephen) and art critic and theorist Clive Bell were important advocates of modern art and design in Great Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. Their successive London homes and country house in East Sussex, Charleston, served as gathering places for artists and intellectuals as they worked to foster a community for modern art.

Vanessa, the older sister of writer Virginia Woolf, was born in London, where she studied painting at the Royal Academy and the Slade School of Fine Art. Between 1904 and 1907, her home at 46 Gordon Square, located in the Bloomsbury district of the city’s West End, became a primary meeting place for the Bloomsbury Group. Members included writers E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, and Woolf, economist John Maynard Keynes, the artist Duncan Grant, and art critic Roger Fry. Vanessa and Clive married in 1907 but maintained an open relationship for more than five decades and pursued lives largely independent of one another by the end of the First World War: the Cambridge-educated Clive maintained a primary residence in London, as he taught at several universities in Britain, while Vanessa pursued her career as a painter while living in East Sussex with her longtime romantic partner Grant.

Between 1910 and 1914, the couple accompanied Fry on several trips to Paris, where they visited the studios of André Derain, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso and met the American collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. During these early trips, Clive purchased Picasso’s Still Life with Lemons (1907; Albertina Collection), the first work by Picasso to enter a British collection. He assisted Fry with curating several important exhibitions in the coming decades, including Manet and the Post-Impressionists (1910) and Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (1912), both held at the Grafton Galleries in London. In 1914, Vanessa purchased two works from the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.

In 1913, Vanessa cofounded the Omega Workshops with Fry and Grant; she served as director of the influential artist-led design collective until its closure in 1919. In order to promote the unity of decorative and fine arts, and to foster experimental interior design in Britain, Omega offered financial support for practicing artists to produce and market a range of domestic items. Though Omega works were exhibited and sold anonymously, the collective mounted exhibitions to highlight the work of affiliated artists.

Charleston, Vanessa, and Clive’s country home in East Sussex, was a primary Bloomsbury meeting place and an evolving, total expression of the group’s collective aesthetic philosophy. The home became Vanessa’s primary residence in 1916, when she moved there with her and Clive’s two young sons; Grant; and Grant’s lover, the artist David Garnett. She completed the intimate portrait Duncan Grant in Front of a Mirror (1916‒17; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) at this early juncture. Between 1916 and 1939, the three artists transformed the seventeenth-century farmhouse and its grounds. They constructed an Italianate walled garden designed by Fry and filled each room of the home with painted furniture, ceramics, textiles, and prints from the Omega Workshops. Inspired by Italian frescos, Vanessa, Grant, and Garnett decorated nearly every surface of the interior—including the doors and mantles—with intricate mural schemes. The painted walls were interspersed with canvases by Bloomsbury associates, paintings by Derain, Picasso, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Omega-affiliated British painters Walter Richard Sickert, Matthew Smith, and Stephen Tomlin. In 1941, Vanessa and Grant also completed a suite of murals at the nearby Berwick Church. Vanessa remained at Charleston until her death in 1961; Clive died three years later. The house was restored and opened to the public as a museum in 1986 and remains under the administration of National Trust.