Vanessa Bell valuation
Painter and designer of the Bloomsbury Group, who made Charleston a work of art in itself.
Vanessa Bell was born in London in 1879, the elder daughter of the critic Sir Leslie Stephen and the sister of Virginia Woolf.
What a work by Vanessa Bell is worth
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Bio
Vanessa Bell was born in London in 1879, the elder daughter of the critic Sir Leslie Stephen and the sister of Virginia Woolf. She studied at Arthur Cope's art school from 1896 and at the Slade in 1901, and after her father's death moved with her siblings to Gordon Square, where the Thursday evenings of her brother Thoby's Cambridge friends became the Bloomsbury Group. She married the critic Clive Bell in 1907. Under the influence of Roger Fry's Post-Impressionist exhibitions she became one of the most adventurous British painters of the 1910s, making some of the first abstract paintings in Britain, and she was a co-director of Fry's Omega Workshops. From 1916 she lived and worked at Charleston, the Sussex farmhouse she shared with Duncan Grant, where she died in 1961.
She made paintings, designs and decorated objects in quantity, and much of it stayed with family and friends, so works with a Bloomsbury or Charleston provenance appear fairly often. Furniture, ceramics, textiles and the book jackets she designed, including those for Virginia Woolf's novels at the Hogarth Press, have a market of their own. Attribution between Bell and Grant, who often worked on the same pieces, is a common question.
Gordon Square, Omega and Charleston
Her first solo exhibition was at the Independent Gallery in London in 1922. With Grant she painted the Famous Women Dinner Service for Kenneth Clark in the early 1930s; long out of view, it was shown again in London in 2018.
Charleston, the house she and Grant decorated over half a century, is open to the public.
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