Mendofleur

Vanessa Bell is synonymous with two names, Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf. The photo above is one of my favorites of her and quite well known as it is published in many books that make reference to her. I actually came to know her though her sister, Virginia Woolf, the famous writer. I have been fascinated with Vanessa’s life for the last twenty-five years and have read most everything published on her life, including a recent reading of her published letters. She was the older sister to Virginia. She seemed to be the one to shoulder everyone’s heartaches and losses. She helped Virginia weather many breakdowns, lost her dear younger brother to a sudden illness, weathered a failed marriage when it was improper to step outside the Victorian confines of such a thing, lived with a lover who was largely homosexual throughout their lifetime together, experienced the loss of her eldest son in the war, witnessed the heartbreaking marriage of her daughter, Angelica to a man that was twice her age and peer of the Bloomsbury Group, and suffered the trauma of Virginia’s suicide. The list goes on, but what is most remarkable about Vanessa was her dedication to her art and the life she designed around this constancy, this will to purpose.

This is a painted wall decoration above the fireplace in the Garden Room at Charleston. Vanessa and her partner, Duncan Grant decorated this Sussex farmhouse together.

“Bohemians have always been rebels. Rebels, but not revolutionaries. The desire is less to overturn the seats of power, but to reject the dull conformity of mass taste and manners.” This book features some insight about Vanessa and her art and lifestyle.

What I find most remarkable is that one could walk into this room today and feel contemporary as well as immediate comfort.

This is the detail of the Garden room with a stenciled paisley pattern designed by Vanessa and painted by her and Duncan Grant. The design seems timeless.

In Isabelle Anscombe’s book, she says that in the late 1920′s, “decorative work became a major part of Vanessa’s life at this time, as she used it to create a cherished and hospitable home for the people she cared for, combining her painting and looking after children with gardening, painting murals, designing carpets, decorating teacups or working cross-stitch cushions.” Vanessa also made many of her own clothing from fabrics she would bring home from her travels in Europe. “Although Vanessa might possibly have been a finer painter had she not lived a life ‘packed like a cabinet of drawers’, as her sister Virginia described it, she never sacrificed her art, continuing to paint until her death in 1961 at the age of eighty-one.

Her life is filled with stoic example, inspiring perseverance, beautiful art and craft, tolerance, passion, as well as dreams met and unfulfilled. As a note, the current issue of Selvedge has a wonderful article on Bloomsbury with some insight on Vanessa.