9–26 November 2024 • London

Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant lived and worked side by side from 1914 until she died in 1961. Although Bell was married when they met, the pair had become lovers shortly before moving to Charleston together with Bell’s two young sons and Grant’s lover, the writer David Garnett. It was a different interpretation of domesticity, but one that was accommodated at Charleston. Although the sexual element of their relationship didn’t endure, a lifelong platonic friendship and creative companionship prevailed. They had a daughter together, Angelica, who was born on Christmas Day at Charleston in 1918.

Born in Scotland in 1885, Grant spent the first nine years of his life in India, which had a lasting impact on his aesthetic. Using self-portraiture to experiment with self-identity, casting himself in many roles, his striking Self Portrait from 1909, rich with the influences, colours and traditions of Grant’s childhood is a highlight within the exhibition.

Portraiture also gives insight into the overlapping relationships within their circle. John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of modern times, had a room at Charleston where he would stay at weekends. In this painting from 1917, Keynes, who was working in the Treasury at the time, is pictured sitting in Charleston’s walled garden, deeply engrossed in his writing, sporting an Omega Workshops cap. Grant and Keynes had been lovers eight years before and remained great friends for the rest of Keynes’ life.

The exhibition reflects the scope of Grant’s dynamic working practices, reflected in a log box that he playfully decorated for Charleston soon after moving in. Depicting an angelic musician or dancer on each side, Grant brings the spirit of London, as well as Europe, from Renaissance painting to the Ballet russe, to the rural fireside in Sussex. This act of making the mundane beautiful was something the Bloomsbury artists achieved throughout their lives.

Bell’s affinity with portraiture is also be represented with a depiction of Grant’s aunt Lady Jane Strachey in 1923. An incredibly inspiring figure, Lady Strachey started campaigning for women to get the vote in the late 1860s. Mother to 13 children, she ensured all her daughters went to university, at a time when it was not commonplace. It was Lady Strachey who persuaded Grant’s parents to allow him to go to art school. This powerful portrait was last exhibited outside of the house in Dulwich Picture Gallery’s acclaimed retrospective in 2017.

A further work depicts the kitchen at Charleston during the Second World War, circa 1943, much of which remains the same today. Bell captures the daily drudge of preparing food for the family from scratch, with Grace Higgens at the centre. Higgens joined Bell’s household in 1920, when she was 16, working as a nursemaid to Bell’s daughter. She later became housekeeper at Charleston, retiring fifty years later in 1970.

Among the paintings by Bell, an early work – depicting a hotel garden in Florence in 1909, where she spent several weeks with her husband Clive Bell, sightseeing, socialising and working – is leaving Charleston to go on view at Sotheby's for the first time.

Vanessa Bell’s Gift to Her Sister 

Among Vanessa Bell’s oeuvre were landscapes, interiors and still lifes, as well as several portraits of her inner circle, but narrative paintings, such as this work, are very rare. This has remained in private hands, since first gifted to her sister Virginia Woolf, from whose estate it sold to playwright Howard Ginsberg more than 40 years ago.

Painted in 1920, it was exhibited briefly two years later in a show on The London Group, at Heal’s pioneering Mansard Gallery in Tottenham Court Road. The painting was reviewed by British Vogue, who illustrated it in black and white, who called it ‘a charmingly inimical vision of the social amenities that is also a very striking composition’. Following the show, Mrs Dalloway’s Party disappeared into the collection of Virginia Woolf, not to be seen again until it was rediscovered in her belongings by her son Quentin.

Evocative of the extravagant and liberal parties of 1920s Bloomsbury, the work was initially simply titled The Party, but when reemerging in 1983 became known as Mrs Dalloway’s Party – echoing Woolf’s most famous novel, Mrs Dalloway (the preliminary title of which was The Party), published in 1925, for which Bell had created the cover art.

In Mrs Dalloway, the reader follows a day in the life of a fictional woman in London’s high society, when she is preoccupied with the last-minute details of planning and hosting a dinner party. Fittingly, the novel originated from a short story on Mrs Dalloway wandering the shops of Bond Street.

The sisters often found inspiration in each other, and so it is possible that this painting was a link in the evolution of Woolf’s story (perhaps the impetus for the party scene that closes the novel). Such is the enigma, that Ginsberg was inspired to write a two-act play based on the work.

A Pair of Omega Workshop Ceramics

Founded by Roger Fry in 1913 in London, the Omega Workshops produced fabrics, furniture and ceramics, designed by Fry as well as other artists including Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. The pottery was made anonymously as desired by Fry and stamped only with the symbol Ω, the Greek letter Omega.

The aim of the Workshops was to try and remove the boundaries between so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ art through elevating everyday, functional objects such as pots and bowls with the group’s characteristically playful and experimental approach. The production and selling of the Omega works also helped sustain Bell and Grant’s lifestyles as artists.

A Silk Robe by Percy Wyndham Lewis

Percy Wyndham Lewis, founder of the Vorticist movement, was a major figure in the development of the Avant Garde in early 20th century Britain. He had a fleeting yet influential relationship with the Bloomsbury group, and the Omega workshop in particular – where this hand-blocked printed and embroidered silk robe was likely designed and created in 1913–14. During his involvement with the workshop, he created a letterhead for the organisation, candle shade designs, folded screen and several painted ceramics, but a small group of textiles such as this robe were only recently discovered. Lewis left to found his own workshop, the Rebel Art Centre, a short-lived venture that ended at the beginning of August 1914 with the declaration of the First World War.

Charleston is a place that brings people together to engage with art and ideas. The modernist home and studio of the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Charleston was a gathering point for some of the 20th century’s most radical artists, writers and thinkers known collectively as the Bloomsbury group. It is where they came together to imagine society differently and has always been a place where art and experimental thinking are at the centre of everyday life. Today, Charleston has two locations - the house, garden and galleries at Firle and our new space in Lewes. Charleston presenta a dynamic year-round programme of exhibitions, events and festivals. They believe in the power of art, in all its forms, to provoke new ways of thinking and living.

Discover more at www.charleston.org.uk