Private
Vanessa Bell
(1879 - 1961)
Portrait of a Girl in Profile, with a Decorated Background
Private Collection
Vanessa Bell (1879 - 1961)
Gouache
Size:
Height – 14cm
Width – 14cm
Exhibited: Folio Fine Art, “Vanessa Bell Drawings and Designs,” 1967; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, British Painting, 1982 1/19–8/14 1982, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Diverse Directions, 1988 12/12/87–2/7/88
Literature: Llewellyn, Sacha, et al. Women Only Works on Paper. Liss Llewellyn, 2021, p. 43.
This work was described as a design for a ceramic tile when it was first exhibited at the Folio Fine Art
Ltd., London, in 1967. It was likely produced for the potter, Phyllis Keyes, whom Vanessa Bell met in 1931.
Keyes had a workshop in Warren Street, and supplied Bell and Duncan Grant with a variety of tiles, pots,
jugs and vases, either thrown by her or cast from designs that the artists provided. These ceramics then
often featured in decorative schemes completed by the Bloomsbury artists.
The simplicity of this tile design reduces the artist’s style almost to its essence. Robert Travers observes
that while Bell’s oil paintings after the end of the First World War became increasingly built-up, saturated
and developed, her decorative work inherited the freedom of line, colour and abstract composition
which she pursued so fruitfully between 1910 and 1918′.
Vanessa Stephen was the eldest daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Jackson (1846’1895). Her parents lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Westminster, London, and Vanessa lived there until 1904. She was educated at home by her parents in languages, mathematics and history, and took drawing lessons from Ebenezer Cook before she attended Sir Arthur Cope’s art school in 1896, and then studied painting at the Royal Academy in 1901.
During her childhood, Stephen and her sister Virginia were sexually molested by their half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth.
After the deaths of her mother in 1895 and her father in 1904, Vanessa sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and moved to Bloomsbury with 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 couple had an open marriage, both taking lovers throughout their lives. Vanessa Bell had affairs with art critic Roger Fry and with the painter Duncan Grant, with whom she had a daughter, Angelica in 1918, whom Clive Bell raised as his own child.
Vanessa, Clive, Duncan Grant and Duncan’s lover David Garnett moved to the Sussex countryside shortly before the outbreak of First World War, and settled at Charleston Farmhouse near Firle, East 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 her sister Virginia Woolf (three in 1912), Aldous Huxley (1929’1930), and David Garnett (1916).
She is considered one of the major contributors to British portrait drawing and landscape art in the 20th century.
She is portrayed by Janet McTeer in the 1995 Dora Carrington biopic Carrington, and by Miranda Richardson in the 2002 film The Hours alongside Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf. Vanessa Bell is also the subject of Susan Sellers’ novel Vanessa and Virginia.
