A Certain Reputation It Cannot Be Denied

Victoria Horrocks re-remembers Vanessa Bell.

By Victoria HorrocksMay 11, 2025

• Art & Architecture

• Biography & Autobiography

IN 1930, THE LONDON Artists’ Association organized a solo exhibition of Vanessa Bell’s paintings at the Cooling Galleries on New Bond Street. The exhibition included 27 paintings of still lifes, landscapes, and portraiture. The titles suggest typical subject matter for Bell: Nude, Tulips in a Green Jar, Farm at Fontcreuse, Portrait of the Painter’s Daughter, Two Children, to name a few. Bell’s sister Virginia Woolf penned the foreword to the catalog. “Mrs. Bell,” she wrote, “has a certain reputation it cannot be denied. She is a woman, it is said, yet she has looked on nakedness with a brush in her hand. She is reported (one has read it in the newspapers) to be ‘the most considerable painter of her own sex now alive.’”

Despite this emphatic praise for her sister and the allusion to the attention of the press, Bell has been historically overshadowed by the more famous members of the Bloomsbury Group—not only her sister but also her lovers Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and Clive Bell. In the canonical narrative of European modernism and 20th-century English painting, Bell’s work has often been sidelined, despite the way it underpinned that of her contemporaries and played an essential role in defining English postimpressionism. During the last 10 years, however, institutional efforts to right the scale, including a recent retrospective at MK Gallery and earlier exhibitions at the Courtauld Gallery and the Dulwich Picture Gallery, have brought renewed attention to Bell’s multidisciplinary practice—including photography, mosaic, murals, tile work, collage, interior design, and fashion—and her blending of art and life.

By the time Woolf wrote the foreword to Bell’s catalog, her sister was a popular artist in the London scene, having mounted exhibitions at the Allied Artists Association and New English Art Club. She had debuted 25 years earlier with a portrait of Lady Robert Cecil in an April 1905 exhibition at the New Gallery. In October of the same year, Bell founded the Friday Club, a society of artists dedicated to discussion and organizing exhibitions, which at times held meetings in the privacy of her home at 46 Gordon Square, London. That Bell would share her views only in private would become a motif throughout her life, both a sign of her personality and of the times in which she lived, which afforded women few opportunities to publicly develop and express their opinions on art and life. Woolf would later address the virtues of private space and the creative freedom it facilitates in her famous essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), a reality that Bell understood in establishing the Friday Club. In a letter to Clive Bell, whom she would later marry (after rejecting his proposal twice), she made clear how central it was to her vision: “My first idea was that we should meet regularly in private houses.”

Early members of the Friday Club were Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Mary Creighton, Sylvia Milman, John Nash, Henry Lamb, and Edward Wadsworth. They served as the foundation of what would become the Bloomsbury Group, the circle of writers, artists, and intellectuals that gathered at Gordon Square, including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Leonard Woolf, and Lytton Strachey. Artist and critic Roger Fry was invited to speak at the Friday Club in 1910 and became closely acquainted with other key members of the Bloomsbury Group. Fry included Bell’s paintings in his historic Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912 alongside the work of other Bloomsbury artists as well as European and Russian avant-garde painters, such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Georges Braque, Pierre Bonnard, and Boris Anrep. Bell was one of six women—compared with the 38 men—in the exhibition. The Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, along with Fry’s Manet and the Post-Impressionists two years earlier, marked the emergence of modern art in England and defined postimpressionism in reaction to Victorian art, with an emphasis on emotional expression through form—line, color, and shape.

Bell’s early painting, before 1910, demonstrated her formal training from the Royal Academy School under the teaching of John Singer Sargent, at which time she adopted accurate perspective and realistic representation of light and shadow, as seen in paintings like Iceland Poppies (1908–09). Bell, however, began to defy the lessons of her formal training and took inspiration from the growing wave of modernist art in France. She began incorporating abstraction into paintings such as Conversation Piece (1912) and Still Life of Dahlias, Chrysanthemums and Begonias (1912), which use loose gestures, bright color, and bold lines to reinterpret objects, flatten space, and even obscure faces, making sitters for portraits unrecognizable. These developments in her work were beloved by her peers but often criticized by the press. In response to her painting Nosegay, exhibited in 1912, a reviewer in The Observer wrote that “she is so bent upon searching for non-existent angles that the flowers look as if they had been badly cut out of paper.” In the following years, Bell pushed further in this direction, as demonstrated by works such as Abstract Painting (ca. 1914), produced the same year she visited Picasso’s studio in Paris with Fry and Gertrude Stein. Bell also began incorporating collage into her practice with Composition (ca. 1914) and Still Life (Triple Alliance) (ca. 1914).

This period of Bell’s life was characterized by a commitment to creative experimentation and intellectual curiosity that led her to travel beyond England to Italy and France, where she continued to develop an eye for landscape, flora, everyday objects, and people in domestic settings. This experimentation was not limited to her work on board and canvas. In 1913, Fry founded the Omega Workshops, a design collective committed to the fabrication of decorative arts, everyday objects, and home goods in postimpressionist style. Bell and Grant were its co-directors and spearheaded the designs of textiles, rugs, furniture, and more. Members of the Omega Workshops, such as Wyndham Lewis, Nina Hamnett, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, were paid 30 shillings to work three-and-a-half days a week as designers. Bell herself designed dresses, rugs, and textiles. In addition to home goods, the Omega Workshops offered ladies linen tunics for 15 shillings, as well as hand-painted gowns, necklaces, and handbags.

Postimpressionism, then, was a movement not just for the galleries but also for the domestic space. It is no coincidence that Bell, who came of age in a Victorian world where women were constrained by the strictures of traditional domesticity, was a key figure in developing an aesthetic practice that brought art into the domestic sphere. Bell and her contemporaries precipitated a blurring of art and life that would come to define the Bloomsbury Group’s philosophy. Life and all it constituted, for Bell, was an artistic medium. Her country home in Charleston, East Sussex, which would become the Charleston Trust years after her death in 1961, would epitomize this philosophy. As at 46 Gordon Square, the Bloomsbury Group all gathered and at times resided at Charleston. Nearly every object is uniquely designed and each wall or fireplace decorated with elaborate murals, from the delicate tile work in the kitchen to the colorful doors of the armoire in Bell’s bedroom. While much of the painting can be attributed to Bell and Grant, who moved to Charleston as a conscientious objector during World War I, the ceramic mugs and light fixtures are the work of Bell’s son Quentin, and it was Fry who designed the garden in 1918. The home itself is a collaborative artwork, made and remade over the decades that Bell and Bloomsbury lived there.

English modern art in the 1910s favored subjective modes of expression that occupied the private space, both of the home and of the mind. It deployed the use of “significant form,” a term coined by Clive Bell in his 1914 book Art, defined as “lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, [that] stir our aesthetic emotions.” Clive’s work no doubt coalesces the various conversations of the Friday Club and early murmurings of the Bloomsbury Group, and Bell references and queries these terms in a letter to Leonard Woolf in January 1913, a year earlier: “[I]f one of the princip[al] aims of an artist is to imitate or represent facts accurately (is there any difference?) it is impossible that he should also produce significant form, or whatever you like to call it. Does Clive say any more than this?”

In a famous letter from 1928, Virginia Woolf, upon seeing Bell’s painting Three Women (1913–16), now titled A Conversation, wrote to her sister:

I think you are the most remarkable painter. But I maintain you are into the bargain, a satirist, a conveyer of impressions about human life: a short story writer of great wit and able to bring off a situation in a way that rouses my envy. I wonder if I could write the Three Women in prose.

Woolf’s short stories and novels from this period reveal striking similarities to Bell’s paintings in content and form. Both women expressed interior life and quotidian moments in their respective media. The abstracted face in Bell’s 1912 portrait of her sister, for example, parallels the themes of dissolution and identity in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), while Bell’s still lifes emphasize charged relationships between objects, just as Jacob’s Room (1922) concludes with the poignant question of what to do with the deceased protagonist’s shoes. Bell made woodcuts for the covers for nearly every one of Woolf’s books even after her sister died. Their sisterhood was more than familial: they developed a kind of thematic and stylistic kinship, as if members of the same modernist family.

This kind of cross-pollination is evident not only between her and her sister’s work but also across Bell’s own multidisciplinary practice. Her painting, decorative arts, and photography are in gregarious conversation. On September 18, 1913, Bell wrote to Fry about a design for the Omega Workshops: “On the other side you’ll find a rough idea of mine but as it’s only from memory and my pen wouldn’t work perhaps it doesn’t do justice!” Enclosed was a sketch for a series of panels, likely for a fire screen or folding screen, featuring two figures in an embrace, or perhaps in lockstep, arms out, in the throes of a dance. We do not know which work Bell is referring to specifically, but Regina Marler has noted the similarity to Bathers in a Landscape (1913) in the collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The figures, with rounded, disproportionate bodies in a delicate balance of stasis and motion, evoke other works from this period, such as Bell’s design for a folding screen, Adam and Eve (1913–14); a photograph of her and Molly McCarthy dancing in the nude, holding hands, in front of a painting in her Gordon Square studio; and Street Corner Conversation (ca. 1913), which features four men gathered off to the left of the composition against a sharp, abstracted background.

Although recognized primarily as a painter, both in her lifetime and after her death, Bell worked extensively in photography, beginning as early as 1896, and compiled hundreds of photographs into 10 albums over the course of her life. When her first son, Julian, was born in 1908, motherhood became her focus in both a psychological and a photographic sense. Her second son, Quentin, was born in 1910 and her daughter, Angelica, in 1918. She photographed her family and friends incessantly in stylized poses and in costume for plays in her garden, many taken at Charleston and abroad in France, Spain, and Italy. The photographs have typically been used as documents of how the Bloomsbury Group lived, but with a critical eye they reveal yet another dimension of Bell’s practice, which sought to integrate her life and her art.

Bell grew up around the work of many literary and artistic greats, from George Frederic Watts to Alfred, Lord Tennyson to her own great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, who is among the major photographic portraitists of the 19th century. Bell learned at an early age to use cameras like the Frena and to develop film and make prints. Nearly all the photographs in Bell’s albums, however, are taken on her vest-pocket Kodak, known for taking “snapshots” and branded for its simplicity and ease of use. In a photograph of Angelica, aged 10 or 11, Bell poses her daughter lying on her stomach in the grass next to a bust of Bell’s mother, Julia Stephen, carved by the sculptor Carlo Marochetti when Julia was 15 years old. Angelica’s body positioning shows only her face from the shoulders up, mirroring the composition of the bust. The staged alignment of their faces, no doubt at Bell’s direction, supposes a genetic likeness between grandmother and granddaughter. Angelica’s stare hovers just above the camera, perhaps directed at her mother, whose eye would have likely been glued to the viewfinder at the top of her Kodak. The uneven composition and enlarged foreground of the photograph suggest that Bell is on the ground, maybe even lying on her stomach herself, to take the picture. Rather than the posed and classically beautiful family photographs by Cameron that she inherited, Bell’s photographs indicate that she was interested in capturing a relationality between subjects, as opposed to the more allegorical or representational photography of her forebears.

Although Bell, Grant, and Fry were all driven by similar aesthetic goals, with Bell and Grant even painting the same subjects side by side at times, the rejection of Victorian culture was uniquely strident with Bell, who came up against different odds from those facing her male contemporaries at the turn of the century. Her first solo exhibition, in 1916, predated Grant’s by four years, though it is no surprise that it was at Omega, where she was herself a director. While Grant and Fry may have also been drawn to an art practice within the realm of the domestic sphere, Bell’s work, unlike that of her male peers, necessitated the private space. As a woman, she was not afforded the same freedoms in public life as Grant, Fry, and other male members of the Bloomsbury Group. Although Bell was a kindred spirit with Grant, who faced persecution for his sexuality, her legacy has often lurked in his shadow, despite their many shared ventures in interior design and art. Like her sister, Woolf was also deeply affected by Victorian norms. The character Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (1927) is the epitome of this social reality, and the manuscript was excruciating for Bell to read. It reminded her too much of her own mother and their childhood.

Bell’s choice to take photographs with a Kodak snapshot camera and assemble “family albums” comprised of her wider, creative family was not a simple craft decision but a rebellious assertion of her own values in opposition to those of her Victorian upbringing. Her father, Leslie Stephen, after all, had left her and Woolf a family album titled the Mausoleum Book, which had modeled a traditional style of family and photography that Bell’s own snapshots and albums transgress in content and form. The photographs in Bell’s albums codify her own expansive definitions of motherhood and family, including even her extramarital relationships with Fry and Grant (who fathered her daughter Angelica). Her carefully arranged photo albums capture the countercultural belief system of freedom of body and spirit that undergirded Bloomsbury philosophy. Like the Friday Club and her home at Charleston, the albums became another private space wherein Bell was able to articulate her thoughts, opinions, and ideals and express herself freely.

Designing dresses at the Omega Workshops was more than just a creative choice; it was an act of resistance against rigid social structures. Loose-fitting tunics brought the language of postimpressionism and its ethos of emotional expression into the literal fabric of everyday life. Embedded in this rejection of Victorian values, for Bell, was a defiance of the expectations ascribed to women in the late 19th century. Bell often denied lifestyle choices that were conventionally “feminine,” as was remarked by various members of her family and friends. In 1916, when Bell moved to Charleston, Woolf observed that Clive “now takes up the line that [Bell] has ceased to be a presentable lady.” Articulating her resistance to social norms, Bell wrote in a 1920 letter to her friend Madge Vaughan, “If you cannot accept me as I seem to you to be, then you must give me up, for I have no intention of confessing my sins or defending my virtues.” She maintained this lack of concession throughout her life. Even self-portraits painted in her final years present Bell as resolutely impenetrable, stoic, and unrelenting in her address of the viewer.

In a self-portrait painted circa 1952, Bell depicts herself in her studio at Charleston, seated upright in an armchair, donning her signature straw hat, hands gripping her brushes. Despite these indications of her personhood, Bell blurs her face, in the style of her many portraits of friends and family from decades earlier. With this gesture at maintaining the privacy with which she conducted her entire life (having given only one known lecture on art), Bell denies the viewer the privilege of facial expression, recognition, and analysis. It is as if she reminds us that all we need to understand her work is already there—in the photographs, the albums, the sketchbooks, and on the canvases and walls of Charleston.

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Featured image: Vanessa Bell in Cassis, 1938. Published in Maggie Humm, The Bloomsbury Photographs, Yale University Press, 2024. Republished under Fair Use. Image has been cropped.