Vanessa Bell
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- For the American actress, see Vanessa Bell Calloway.
Vanessa Bell (May 28, 1879 – April 7, 1961), was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury group, and the sister of Virginia Woolf.
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[edit] Early life
She was born Vanessa Stephen, the eldest daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Jackson (1846 - 1895) , at 22 Hyde Park Gate, London, where she lived until 1904. She was educated at home by her parents in languages, mathematics and history, and took drawing lessons from Ebenzer Cook before she attended Sir Arthur Cope's art school in 1896, then studied painting at the Royal Academy in 1901.
[edit] Life inside the Bloomsbury Group
After the deaths of her parents in 1895 and 1904, Vanessa moved to Bloomsbury with her sister Virginia and brothers Thoby (1880 - 1906) and Adrian (1883 - 1948), where they met and began socialising with the artists, writers and intellectuals who would come to form the Bloomsbury Group.
She married Clive Bell in 1907 and they had two sons, Julian (who died in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War at the age of 29), and Quentin . The two had an open marriage, both taking lovers throughout their life together. She had affairs with art critic Roger Fry, and painter Duncan Grant, with whom she had a daughter, Angelica in 1918, whom Clive Bell raised as his own daughter. Clive Bell took writer and patron of the arts Mary Hutchinson, among others, as his lover. [1]
Vanessa, Clive, Duncan Grant and Duncan's homosexual lover David Garnett moved to the Sussex countryside shortly before the outbreak of First World War, and settled at Charleston Farmhouse near Firle, Sussex, where she and Grant painted and worked on commissions for the Omega Workshops established by Roger Fry. Vanessa Bell's significant paintings include Studland Beach (1912), The Tub (1918), Interior with Two Women (1932), and portraits of Virginia Woolf (three in 1912), Aldous Huxley (1929-1930), and David Garnett (1916).
She is considered one of the major contributors to British portraiture and landscape art in the 20th century.
[edit] References
- Sketches in Pen and Ink, Vanessa Bell
- A Passionate Apprentince: the early journals, Virginia Woolf
- A Moment's Liberty, Virginia Woolf
- A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, Jane Dunn
- Vanessa Bell, Frances Spalding
- Duncan Grant, Frances Spalding
- Deceived with Kindness: a Bloomsbury Childhood, Angelica Garnett
- Elders and Betters, Quentin Bell
- Charleston, Quentin Bell and Virginia Nicholson
- Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee
