Art News: Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant at Tate Britain, and the Bloomsbury Group explained

Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury opens at Tate Britain on 12 November 2026 and runs until 11 April 2027. It has more than 300 works by Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) and Duncan Grant (1885–1978), the two painters at the centre of the Bloomsbury Group, and Tate has organised it with Charleston, the Sussex farmhouse they shared.

What is on show

The subject is a working partnership of more than fifty years, so the show goes well beyond easel painting. There are portraits, still lifes and landscapes, along with the furniture, ceramics and textiles the two decorated. Tate also restages their studio, moved from Charleston, and calls it once in a lifetime. Among the works are two self-portraits: Bell's of about 1915, from the Yale Center for British Art, and Grant's of about 1920, from a private collection.

Tate warns that one room contains sexually explicit content.

Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant exhibition tickets and times

• Dates: 12 November 2026 to 11 April 2027, at Tate Britain, Millbank.
• Tickets: £20, or £19 for concessions. Tate Members go free, and Tate Collective members, aged 16 to 25, pay £5.
• Audio guide: a smartphone guide can be added for £5 when you book.
• Opening times: 10am to 6pm every day, and until 10pm on Friday 13 November and Friday 12 February for Late at Tate Britain.
• Talk: a curators' talk on 28 November at 7.30pm, booked separately.

We checked these at the start of November, but check with Tate before you travel.

Who were the Bloomsbury Group?

The Bloomsbury Group was a circle of writers, painters and thinkers who met in Bloomsbury, in central London, from about 1905. In 1904 Vanessa Stephen, later Vanessa Bell, moved to 46 Gordon Square with her sister Virginia, later Virginia Woolf, and their brothers, and their brother Thoby's Cambridge friends came to his Thursday evenings. The circle came to include Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, E. M. Forster and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Our guide to the Bloomsbury Group has the full story.

The painters changed course in November 1910, when the critic Roger Fry staged Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries, showing Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Matisse to a largely hostile London. Bell was painting abstracts by 1914. In 1913 Fry founded the Omega Workshops, where Bell and Grant designed and painted furniture, textiles and ceramics.

From 1916 the two lived and worked at Charleston, and over half a century they painted its doors, fireplaces, tables and walls. Between 1932 and 1934 they made the Famous Women Dinner Service, fifty plates commissioned by Kenneth Clark.

Cézanne stayed part of the story. In 1918, on Grant's advice, Keynes went to the sale of Degas's collection in Paris and bought a small Cézanne still life of apples. Unable to carry everything up the lane to Charleston, he hid the picture in a hedge by the gate. It is now at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, on loan from King's College.

How their work is valued

Both painted in quantity and much of it stayed with family and friends, so works with a Bloomsbury or Charleston provenance appear fairly often. The usual question is attribution. Bell and Grant painted the same subjects side by side, worked on the same pieces, and both left work unsigned.

Decorated furniture and ceramics have a market of their own, and because they were made to be used, wear is a condition question that a picture does not raise. A link to Charleston or the Omega Workshops, with the paperwork to show it, helps settle who made what.

If you own a work by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant or another artist of the group, send us photographs of the front, the back and any labels for a free valuation. There is no obligation to sell, and we act for you rather than for the saleroom.

For more to see this season, our guide to London's art exhibitions this winter lists the shows by closing date.

Cover: Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples, 1893–1894. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.