Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell

1879 - 1961

Helen Anrep seated by the Garden Door

twice signed V Bell (lower left)

oil on canvas 

unframed: 63.5 by 51cm.; 25 by 20in.

framed: 78 by 65.5cm.; 30¾ by 25¾in.

Executed circa 1945.

Morris Gallery, London, where acquired by the father of the present owner, and thence by descent 

The California-born Helen Anrep (née Maitland; 1885-1965) studied music in Europe and, after moving to London, became associated with the circle of Augustus John and Henry Lamb. In 1917 she married Boris von Anrep, the Russian mosaicist, and with him had two children. She left Anrep and from 1926 she lived with Roger Fry until his death in 1934, She was a generous supporter of the artists of the Euston Road School, several of whom stayed and painted at her house in Rodwell in Suffolk. She frequently saw Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in London and helped Virginia Woolf when she was writing her biography of Fry. She posed for Bell and Grant at Charleston on numerous occasions. Grant had met her and her mother in the early years of the century in Paris and had first painted her in c. 1930 in Turkish costume (Charleston Trust) and, later, seated at the dining-table at Charleston in c. 1945 (Charleston Trust).

The setting for this portrait is the downstairs studio at Charleston. The door is open onto ‘Grant’s Folly’, a small gravelled area containing a square pool and a mass of fig trees and hydrangeas surrounding its high walls. The painted screen by Grant of the mid-1930s is now in the sitting room at Charleston. Bell enjoyed painting figures in interiors and from such works we learn a good deal about the rooms at Charleston. We can also perhaps imagine something of the conversation of these two elderly women, both of them had been lovers of Roger Fry.

Richard Shone