Bell, Vanessa

Bell, Vanessa (1879–1961). British painter and designer, born in London into a distinguished literary family; her father was Sir Leslie Stephen, the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and her younger sister became famous as the novelist Virginia Woolf. She studied at the Royal Academy Schools, 1901–4, and in 1905 founded the Friday Club as a discussion group for artists. In 1907 she married Clive Bell, and their house at 46 Gordon Square became one of the focal points of the Bloomsbury Group. Her early work, up to about 1910, and her paintings produced after the First World War are tasteful and fairly conventional, in the tradition of the New English Art Club, but in the intervening period she was briefly in the vanguard of progressive ideas in British art. At this time, stimulated by the Post-Impressionist exhibitions organized by Roger Fry (with whom she had an affair), she worked with bright colours and bold forms, and by 1914 she was painting completely abstract pictures. Her designs for Fry's Omega Workshops include a folding screen (V&A, London, 1913–14) clearly showing the influence of Matisse ( Gertrude Stein had introduced her to Matisse and Picasso in Paris in January 1914).

From 1916 Bell lived with Duncan Grant, by whom she had a daughter in 1918. However, she remained on good terms with her husband, who was lavish in his praise of both her and Grant's work. Bell and Grant spent a good deal of time in London and travelling abroad, but they lived mainly at Charleston Farmhouse, at Firle, Sussex, and did much painted decoration in the house; it has been restored as a Bloomsbury memorial and is open to the public (the couple are buried together nearby in Firle churchyard). In addition to the work at Charleston, they collaborated on other decorative schemes, including a series of murals at Berwick church, Sussex, a few miles away. Bell's independent work included portraits, landscapes, interiors, and figure compositions. She also did a good deal of design work, including covers for books published by the Hogarth Press, founded by Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard Woolf in 1917. After the Second World War, her work—like that of Grant—went out of fashion, but she continued painting vigorously into her old age, even though the death of her son, the poet Julian Bell (1908–37), in the Spanish Civil War was ‘the end of all real happiness’ ( Richard Shone, Bloomsbury Portraits, 1976). Throughout her life Bell was a voluminous correspondent. About 3,000 of her letters survive, providing a rich source of information on the Bloomsbury circle; some 600 of them appear in Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, edited by Regina Marler (1993).