| Description | Letters from Vanessa Bell, née Stephen, to Duncan Grant, covering much of the artists' relationship over half a century and their interaction with friends and family.
Recurring themes include :
- Bell's family, including husband, art critic Clive Bell, sons Julian and Quentin, and siblings Adrian Stephen, a psychoanalyst and Virginia Woolf, one of the key modernist writers;
- Bell's involvement with the Bloomsbury Group and other cultural figures, such as Russian mosaic artist Boris Anrep; painters Dora Carrington and Matthew Smith; the art critic, curator and painter Roger Fry (with whom Bell had an affair), his mistress Helen Anrep and sister Margery; the French theatre director Jacques Copeau, for whom Grant designed several productions; the modernist artists André Derain, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, whose Paris studios Bell visited with Fry; her friend Faith Henderson; the artist Barbara Hiles (Bagenal); Clive's mistress Mary Hutchinson; economist John Maynard Keynes and his wife, the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova; critic Desmond MacCarthy and his writer wife Molly; socialite and patron Ottoline Morrell; critic Raymond Mortimer; mathematician H.S. 'Harry' Norton; classicist John Tresidder Sheppard; Grant's Strachey cousins, psychoanalyst James, and writers Dorothy (wife of French painter Simon Bussy), Lytton and Marjorie; civil servant Sydney Saxon-Turner; sculptor Stephen Tomlin; and Leonard Woolf, Virginia's husband and with her founder of the Hogarth Press;
- her artistic collaborations with Duncan Grant and others, most notably their directorship of Roger Fry's Omega Workshops (1913-1919), their decorative schemes for Keynes at King's College, Cambridge (1920-1921), Mary Hutchinson's house in Regent's Park (1925), Ethel Sands' Château d'Auppegard (1927), Dorothy Wellesley's Penns-in-the-woods (1929-1931), the ocean liner 'Queen Mary' (1935), and Berwick Church (1941-1943);
- Bell's own work, its production and display in solo and group exhibitions with organisations such as the Friday Club, the Grafton Group, the London Group, the London Artists' Association, and the Society of Mural Painters;
- her experiences during two world wars : her ménage à trois with Grant and David 'Bunny' Garnett during the First World War, leading to the lease of Charleston Farmhouse, Firle, East Sussex, where Bell and Grant would be based for the rest of their lives, and the birth of her daughter with Grant, Angelica, later to marry Bunny; and
- her difficulties with servants, most notably Mrs Brereton, Nellie Brittain, Louie Dunnet, Grace Germany, and the Selwood sisters, Flossie, Mabel and Trissie.
File includes two letters to Grant from Bunny Garnett, written when Vanessa was in labour with Angelica (December 1918), and a letter to Grant from Claude Rogers (November 1949). |