Vanessa Bell (1879 - 1961)
Vanessa was a painter, interior designer, Bloomsbury group founding member, the elder sister of Virginia Woolf and designed almost all of her sister’s book covers. Apparently the two sisters had an agreement, one would become the writer and one the painter, and although her younger sister’s fame spread far beyond hers, Vanessa was just as prolific and visionary in her work and both competitive and encouraging of each other’s work. They grew up in London, in a typical Victorian home, with an extra cautious father, and on his death both broke from his traditional conservatism. Vanessa learnt drawing from Ebenezer Cook, was educated at Sir Arthur Cope's art school and studied painting at the Royal Academy under Singer Sargent. Her painting began rather traditionally, but through contact with Roger Fry and his Post-Impressionist exhibitions her portraits and work became more expressive and abstract. After both her mother, and then her father’s death in 1904, the sisters moved to Bloomsbury and started to socialise with the other creatives in the area. Together they later formed the Bloomsbury group. In 1906 she formed the Friday club, a social and painting club, and in 1914 she fully embraced a period of abstraction. She designed pieces for Fry’s Omega Workshops and had her first solo exhibition at Omega in 1916. In 1932 Kenneth Clark commissioned her and her partner Duncan Grant to create a dinner service. With full creative license and encouragement from Kenneth’s wife, they created the Famous Women Dinner Service decorated with portraits of notable women in history at the time. The collection was only recently rediscovered and in 2018 was exhibited for the first time in London. In 1916 Bell & Grant moved to East Sussex and lived in Charleston Farmhouse near Firle, which became a melting pot for creatives. Charleston is now a museum and gallery which holds the full Dinner Service collection and many other pieces. Her arresting faceless portrait of her sister also sits in the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Tate Modern in London holds several of her pieces. The Art Institute of Chicago, National Gallery of Australia and Los Angeles County Museum of Art also holds her work.
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