Vanessa Bell was an English painter, interior designer and founding member of the Bloomsbury group. She was known for her colourful portraits and still-life paintings and for her dust-jacket designs.
Background
Bell was born in London, United Kingdom, on May 30, 1879. She was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, a Victorian scholar and writer, and his second wife Julia Prinsep Duckworth. Vanessa Bell was the eldest child in the family. She had a sister, Virginia Woolf, an important modernist 20th-century author, and two brothers, Thoby and Adrian. Besides, she was a half-sister of Laura Makepeace, George Herbert and Gerald Duckworth.
Education
Vanessa Bell was mostly educated at home. Vanessa studied painting with Ebenezer Cook before she started to attend Sir Arthur Cope's art school in 1896. In 1899 she entered the Royal Academy (present-day Royal College of Art).
When Vanessa Bell's mother died in 1895, she became the housekeeper for the family. However, her father was quite demanding and strict, and she tried to balance her domestic role with artistic interests. After her father's death in 1904, she sold her family house and moved with her sister and two brothers to Bloomsbury, London.
The move to the new place enabled Vanessa and her siblings to start new lives and met their own friends. On Thursday nights they invited their creative friends to the house. In addition, Vanessa Bell started the Friday Club, a special meeting for artists. Eventually, it was decided to set up the Bloomsbury Group, a group of English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the first half of the 20th century. Among them were Lytton Strachey, Desmond MacCarthy, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Leonard Woolf and Duncan Grant.
The painter moved to the Sussex countryside right before the onset of World War I. There she settled at Charleston Farmhouse not far from Firle, East Sussex, devoting her time to painting and working on commissions for the Omega Workshops. In 1916 her first individual exhibition was held at the Omega Workshops.
Charleston became a huge source of inspiration for Vanessa Bell's art. Bell made numerous design changes to the home including painting works on walls and furniture and artistically designing the gardens. It was here that she painted the subjects she best knew: landscapes, portraits, and still lifes. After the war was over, Bell frequently traveled and her paintings were greatly influenced by the places she saw and the people she met. She quite often visited the salons at Gertrude Stein's Paris home and the studios of Matisse and Picasso.
Being a prolific artist, Bell lived through tough tragedies the last decades of her live, which began with Roger Fry's death in 1934, which was followed by the death of her eldest son Julian in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, and finally the suicide of her sister Virginia Woolf. Despite the hard losses, her art provided an asylum for Bell.
She received an important commission to decorate the RMS Queen Mary ship in 1936. Bell was asked to design a new room, which was to be a private dining room. Besides, in 1939 Vanessa Bell was commissioned to produce a painting for Berwick Church in Sussex. In April 1961 the painter suffered from bronchitis from which she would not recover.
Flowers in a Glass Vase with Abstract Needlework Design
View of the Pond at Charleston
Basket of Flowers
The Garden at Charleston; Small pond with classical torso
The Nurse
Siena
Church of the Redentore, Venice
Views
Quotations:
"I do not think it matters whether one agrees or not as long as one is forced to think."
Personality
In the last years of her life, Vanessa Bell became socially reserved, except with those in her own circle of acquaintances.
Connections
Vanessa Bell married Clive Bell in 1907. They parented two sons, Julian (who died in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War) and Quentin, both of whom became writers. The couple had an open marriage, they both had lovers throughout their lives. Vanessa Bell had romantic relationships with Roger Fry, an art critic, and Duncan Grant, a painter. With Grant she had a daughter, Angelica, who they pretended was the daughter of Vanessa’s husband Clive Bell. Their deceit was successfully maintained until Angelica was nineteen years old, when the girl discovered the truth.