Vanessa Bell
1879 - 1961
Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury group of artists and thinkers, which also included Roger Fry, Duncan Grant and Dora Carrington. She was the wife of art critic Clive Bell and the sister of the writer Virginia Woolf.
Vanessa Bell was born in London, 30 May 1879, and died in Charleston, Firle, Sussex, 7 April 1961. She was a daughter of the eminent literary critic Sir Leslie Stephen and his wife Julia Duckworth. Vanessa Bell inherited a High Victorian attitude to art against which she was to react.
She trained as a painter under Arthur Cope (1857-1940), then at the Royal Academy Schools, where one of her tutors was John Singer Sargent.
From 1906 she begins to assert herself as an artist, forming the Friday Club in an attempt to create an atmosphere in London more conducive to painting. Her "Iceland Poppies", exhibited at the New English Art Club in the summer of 1909, was praised by Sickert and marks her artistic maturity. Its quiet, restrained naturalism was, however, to be exploded a year later by her experience of Post-Impressionism.
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