Vanessa Bell

Painter and designer Vanessa Bell was the oldest of the four children of Sir Leslie Stephen (1832- 1904), literary critic and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. She abandoned the early influence of G.F.Watts, a family friend, when she studied at the Royal Academy Schools with Sargent, and founded the Friday Club in 1905, whose meetings, lectures and exhibitions provided young artists with a forum for modern art. She married Clive Bell in 1907; her sister Virginia married Leonard Woolf in 1912.

They were influential figures in the Bloomsbury Group, a circle including writers, artists and critics who shared no common ideology but came to represent an intellectual ‚lite which, in the first decades of the twentieth century, pitched itself against the restricting conventions of 'Victorian' culture. After meeting Roger Fry in 1910, the naturalism of Bell's earlier work gave way dramatically to the influence of Picasso and Matisse and her bold, simplified forms and ventures into non-representational art placed her in the vanguard of English modernism. Closely involved with the Omega Workshops, she was both a designer and its co-director between 1913 and 1919. After World War I her work once again became more naturalistic. She formed a partnership, both personal and professional, with the painter Duncan Grant, whom she had first met in 1905. They often shared subjects, and exhibited regularly with the London Group and the London Artists' Association.