Bloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury Group was a circle of writers, artists and thinkers who met in Bloomsbury, in central London, from 1905; its painters, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and the critic Roger Fry, brought Post-Impressionism to Britain and made no distinction between painting a picture and decorating a room.
The group grew out of a family and a university. After the death of Sir Leslie Stephen in 1904, his children Vanessa, Virginia, Thoby and Adrian moved to 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, and Thoby's Cambridge friends, Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell among them, came to his Thursday evenings. In 1905 Vanessa started the Friday Club, where painters could show and talk about their work. The writers became famous later: Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster and the economist John Maynard Keynes. The painters were Vanessa, who married Clive Bell in 1907, and Duncan Grant, Strachey's cousin, who had trained at the Westminster School of Art and in Paris.
Roger Fry, a critic and painter who joined them in 1910, changed what they painted. His exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, at the Grafton Galleries in London in November 1910, showed Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Matisse to a largely hostile British public, and his Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1912 hung Bell and Grant beside Matisse and Picasso. Their colours brightened and their forms simplified; Bell was painting abstracts by 1914. In 1913 Fry founded the Omega Workshops in Fitzroy Square, with Bell and Grant as fellow directors, to sell furniture, textiles and ceramics designed by artists and marked only with the Greek letter omega; it closed in 1919. From 1916 Bell and Grant lived at Charleston, a farmhouse near Firle in Sussex, and over the next half-century painted its walls, doors, fireplaces and furniture. Carrington, who had trained at the Slade, lived on the group's edge with Lytton Strachey from 1917.
At a glance
- When
- 1905 to the 1930s
- Where
- London and Sussex
- Leading artists
- Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant
Characteristics of the Bloomsbury Group
- Post-Impressionist colour
- Bright, flat colour and simplified forms, learned from Cézanne, Gauguin and Matisse.
- Private subjects
- Interiors, still lifes, gardens, the Sussex landscape and portraits of one another.
- Art for the home
- Painted furniture, screens, textiles, ceramics and whole rooms, with no line drawn between fine and decorative art.
- Significant form
- Clive Bell's idea, set out in his book Art in 1914, that what matters in a picture is its arrangement of line and colour.
- Side by side
- Painters who worked together on the same subjects and often left their work unsigned.
Bloomsbury artists
Every artist below has a page on this site, with a short biography and what a valuation of their work turns on.
The painters
Famous Bloomsbury works
- BathingDuncan Grant, 1911
- Studland BeachVanessa Bell, 1912
- Lytton StracheyDora Carrington, 1916, National Portrait Gallery, London
- Farm at WatendlathDora Carrington, 1921, Tate, London
- The Famous Women Dinner ServiceVanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, 1932 to 1934
What a valuation turns on
Bloomsbury pictures were seldom made for the market. Much of the work stayed with the artists, their families and their friends, so a provenance that runs back to Charleston or to the circle around it is common, and worth documenting. The same habits make attribution the main question: Bell and Grant painted side by side, often the same subject, and often left work unsigned, and Carrington signed almost nothing. Comparison with documented works settles most of it, and for Bell and Grant, Charleston and the artists' estates are the reference.
The decorative work is a market of its own. Omega Workshops pieces, painted furniture, screens, ceramics, textiles and the book jackets Bell designed for the Hogarth Press are collected alongside the paintings, and raise questions pictures do not: painted furniture was used, and wear, overpainting and later restoration all need establishing before a sale.
Common questions
What was the Bloomsbury Group?
A circle of writers, artists and intellectuals who met in Bloomsbury, in central London, from 1905, among them Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, E. M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes. They never called themselves a movement; friendship and a shared belief in the arts held them together.
Who were the Bloomsbury artists?
Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and the critic and painter Roger Fry, with Dora Carrington and Mark Gertler among those on the edges of the group. The Omega Workshops, which Fry ran from 1913 to 1919, brought in other artists too.
What were the Omega Workshops?
A design company Roger Fry founded at 33 Fitzroy Square in London in 1913, with Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant as fellow directors. Artists designed furniture, textiles, ceramics and whole rooms, sold anonymously under the Greek letter omega. It closed in 1919.
What is Charleston?
The farmhouse near Firle, in East Sussex, where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant lived from 1916 and which they decorated over the next half-century. It has been open to the public since 1986.
How do I sell a Bloomsbury painting?
Send photographs of the front, the back, any signature or inscription, and whatever you know of where it came from, for a free, confidential valuation. We check the work against documented pictures and its provenance, then compare a confidential private sale with auction.
