Vanessa Bell

PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF HOWARD AND BARBARA GINSBERG

Vanessa Bell

The Party

signed V. Bell and dated 1920 (lower right)

oil on canvas

unframed: 71 by 60.5cm.; 28 by 23¾in.

framed: 74.5 by 85.5cm.; 29¼ by 33½in.

Executed in 1920.

Virginia Woolf

Quentin Bell

Anthony d’Offay, London, (as Mrs Dalloway’s Party) where acquired by Mrs Barbara Ginsberg, 1983

London, Mansard Gallery, The London Group 16th Exhibition, 8 May - 3 June 1922

Palo Alto, California, Stanford University Museum of Art, Bloomsbury Exhibition, 1 April – 15 June 1997 (as Mrs Dalloway’s Party)

Anonymous, “Preparing for the Grand Style” Vogue (London), June 1922, pp 62-63, illustrated

Anonymous, “London Group Spring Exhibition” New Age Review, 11 May 1922, pp. 90-91

Maggie Humm (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and The Arts, Diane F. Gillespie, “Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Painting”, Edinburgh University Press, 2010, pp 121-139, illustrated (as Mrs Dalloway’s Party)

Anonymous, ‘The Mysterious Gift to Virginia Woolf’, Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain Bulletin, No. 66, January 2021, p. 55-52 (as Mrs Dalloway’s Party)

Erica Gene D’Alessandro (ed.), Women Making Modernism, Jane Garrity, “The Haunting of Mary Hutchinson”, Gainesville, FL University Press, Florida, pp. 55-96 (as Mrs Dalloway’s Party)

Howard Ginsberg, The Mysterious Gift to Virginia Woolf, Andy Jordan Productions, YouTube, 2024, illustrated

Vanessa Thorpe, ‘Discovered: a lost possible inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway’, The Observer, 5 October 2024, illustrated

Hikmat Mohammed, ‘Dior Men’s and Fendi Womenwear Artistic Director Kim Jones Curates a Bloomsbury Group Exhibition for Sotheby’s’, Women’s Wear Daily, 7 October 2024,illustrated

Jo Lawson-Tancred, ‘Fashion Designer Kim Jones Curates a Show of Bloomsbury Group Treasures’, Artnet News, 7 October 2024, illustrated

Anonymous, ‘Bloomsbury Group Celebrated in New Exhibition Including Rarely Seen Virginia Woolf Gift’, Fine Books & Collections Magazine, 8 October 2024

In the light, teasing foreword Virginia Woolf wrote for a 1930 exhibition catalogue of her sister Vanessa Bell’s new work, she pointed out the reticence of paintings compared to novels, and the scant psychological insight they offer: “One defies a novelist to keep his life through twenty-seven volumes of fiction safe from our scrutiny. But Mrs Bell says nothing. Mrs Bell is as silent as the grave. Her pictures do not betray her…That is why they intrigue and draw us on.” She described Bell as a “painter’s painter,” a formal innovator whose beautiful, understated works could not be read as stories: “still her pictures claim us and make us stop. They give us an emotion. They offer a puzzle.” (VW Essays vol. 5, p139)

Bell’s vibrant and virtually unknown painting, The Party, presents more than the usual puzzle—not least because it may have been stored in a closet or stashed behind a chest of drawers in Woolf’s own house while she wrote that 1930 foreword. The documented history of The Party can fit into a mere paragraph or two—with a tantalizing aura of mystery surrounding these bare facts. Painted in 1920 (dated by Bell lower right), it was shown in public just once, at the May-June 1922 exhibition of The London Group at Heal’s Mansard Gallery, where it was marked Not For Sale. (It may be the work Duncan Grant referred to in a letter to Bell of 22 April 1922: “The photographer came this morning and took your picture. It looks ravishing in the varnish. I’m going to have an Italian frame cut down for it.”) One review in Vogue in early June mentioned the painting--“a charmingly ironical vision of the social amenities that is also a very striking composition”--and included a black and white illustration. Between that mention and the painting’s reappearance in 1983: silence. “Mrs Bell says nothing.”

By the time Barbara Ginsberg, an American art collector and Anglophile, discovered The Party at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 1983, the painting had acquired the intriguing title, Mrs Dalloway’s Party. The provenance was listed as “Virginia Woolf and Quentin Bell.” Mrs Ginsberg and her husband Howard were told that the painting had been found in the attic of Monks House, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s country home in Rodmell, East Sussex. Perhaps it was among personal effects that Trekkie Parsons, Leonard’s companion and Executor, found there and distributed after his death in 1969. Perhaps it remained with Quentin Bell until, following the death of Duncan Grant in 1978, Grant’s friends organized the Charleston Appeal to save and restore Charleston Farmhouse.

In these years, many artworks and even family heirlooms were sold to benefit Charleston. D’Offay was chosen to represent the Estates of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and only then were Bell’s daring, brightly-colored early abstracts rediscovered, allowing a radical reassessment of her place in 20^th century British art.

The Party is unusual among Bell’s paintings primarily because it does offer some narrative enticements. In rich, appealing tones—even the patch of brown madder carpet draws the eye--Bell depicts a society party, with three conversational groups in evening dress and a man who has turned his back on the viewer. Is he also in conversation, or has he been rebuffed by the women in the foreground? The composition is crowded, but the groups remain distinct. Woolf once remarked that her sister liked a strong vertical in the center of her images, and that vertical is present in the central female figure with her bare arm in dramatic forced perspective.

Some of these faces seem familiar, even if painted from memory. The looming central figure in the black dress with deep décolletage recalls the model Iris Tree, whom Bell had earlier painted: even the large brooch resembles that worn by Tree in Bell’s 1915 portrait, now at the Tate. After spotting Tree at a 1919 party, Bell noted that she had lost weight; Bell preferred her “fat and bold.” Perhaps she has restored some of Tree’s youthful curves here.

Similarly, the woman in the left foreground strongly resembles Mary Hutchinson, the mistress of Clive Bell, Vanessa’s husband. Scholar Jane Garrity concurs in her essay, “The Haunting of Mary Hutchinson:” “It looks very much like her, and the woman’s elegant off-the-shoulder gown as well as the depiction of a party setting, are congruent with what we know about Hutchinson’s life as a socialite.” Vanessa’s satirical 1915 portrait of Mary (Tate) derives from the Bloomsbury habit of playful deprecation. Mary was “made for salons,” Vanessa wrote to Lytton Strachey, “Her exquisiteness is not lost upon us but it ought really to be seen by the polite world.”

In spring 1920, Bell traveled to Italy via Paris with Maynard Keynes and Duncan Grant, soaking in the art and friends they had missed through the war years, when only Keynes had been permitted abroad.[1] They visited Picasso in his studio, Bell describing for Roger Fry his new neoclassical works: “an astonishing painting of 2 nudes, most elaborately finished and rounder and more definite than any Ingres, fearfully good, I thought.” (VB Letters, 244) Other artists were also exploring figuration again and more naturalistic treatment of their subjects. The Party probably dates from summer or fall 1920, when Bell was integrating these fresh ideas.

In this period, Virginia Woolf was deeply involved in writing Jacob’s Room (1922). Soon she would start on the two short stories that evolved into her next novel, Mrs Dalloway (1925). Though we cannot know exactly when The Party was bought by or given to Woolf—the painting is not mentioned in her diaries or letters, or in Bell’s letters—it may form, as scholar Diane Gillespie has suggested, “one link in the complex evolution of Mrs Dalloway and a visual impetus for the party scene that closes the novel.”[2]

Certainly the sisters were open to mutual influence, despite their loving rivalry. In June 1920, Vanessa told her sister about the tragic death of a young man who fell off the roof at a party hosted by others who shared Bell’s Gordon Square home: an incident she drew on in Mrs Dalloway. One can easily imagine Woolf propping The Party on a chair and contemplating the allure and anxieties of Society.   

Regina Marler

[1] Among other government trips, Keynes was among the British officials bidding on work from Degas’s estate, including a Cezanne that entered his own collection.

[2] The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, 2010: 129.