Vanessa Bell 1879-1961

Vanessa Bell was born in 1879. She inherited a High Victorian attitude towards art, at first producing works which displayed an artistic maturity and a restrained naturalism. Her style soon turned towards Post-Impressionism in 1910. Bell was an active member of the Bloomsbury group, along with her sister, the famous writer Virginia Woolf, and their brother Thoby's Cambridge friends. Vanessa married Clive Bell and together they had two sons. Her life and work were both dramatically altered by the introduction of Roger Fry into the Bloomsbury group in 1910, since in contrast with him her work became shorn of detail and intrusive sentiment. However Bell was willing to experiment, and this was a quality which placed her in the forefront of the avant-garde. She became very involved in the early stages of the Omega Workshops. After the First World War, like many of her contemporaries, Bell turned to a more naturalistic style, and became closely associated with Duncan Grant. Together they exhibited regularly with the London Artists' Association and the London Group. Bell produced a number of book jackets for the Hogarth Press, and in doing so contributed towards its distinctive house-style.