Vanessa Bell


Today is 11th July 2004.

Exactly one hundred years ago today a small social gathering took place at 46 Gordon Square, London. The explosion of creativity that arose from that meeting sent shockwaves through English art that are today as loud and as relevant as art has ever been.

It was such a small thing, a mere reunion of a handful of friends formally of Cambridge University at the London home of Thoby Stephen, one of their number. Thoby had simply invited his friends Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Saxon Sydney Turner, Leonard Woolf and David Garnett to tea, because they all happened to be in town at the same time. It was the first time any of the Cambridge friends had met Thoby's two sisters, Vanessa and Virginia. They sat and had tea and talked. And talked, and talked. The two women enchanted the entire room, Vanessa with her ferocious opinions on art and her boundless energy and rule-breaking enthusiasm for life, Virginia with her searing intellect and lightning wit.

Such meetings soon became a regular Thursday evening event at 46 Gordon Square. The Bloomsbury Group had been born. Soon they would be joined by Dora Carrington, T.S. Eliot, Katharine Mansfield, Ottoline Morrell, and Vita Sackville-West. For more than two generations they would dominate English art and literature. Alas, Thoby would never see it, succumbing to Tuberculosis in 1907, the year after Vanessa and Clive were married, and two years before the marriage of Virginia and Leonard.

In 1910, Vanessa, Clive, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant, under the patronage of Ottoline Morrell, set up their own art gallery in London, the Omega Rooms. They travelled to Europe to find exciting new art for their first exhibition, bringing back works by little known artists whom the Omega Rooms would make household names; among them Van Gogh, Cezanne, Monet, Matisse, and Rodin.

By 1912 John Maynard Keynes had become the foremost economist of his day, and Lytton Strachey had begun to push back the boundaries of what could be done in literature, becoming the pre-eminent figure in a new movement of writers.

In 1913 Virginia and Leonard founded their own publishing house, the Hogarth Press. They were the first to publish works by Eliot, Mansfield and Forster, as well as the first English language translations of the maverick German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Their book covers were adorned by decorative designs from the hands of Vanessa, Duncan Grant and Dora Carrington, which also broke new ground and began what became known as the Bloomsbury style.

Following the outbreak of war in 1914, Vanessa and Clive, who now had two young children Julian and Quentin, elected to move out of London to the Sussex countryside. They took over Charleston, an Elizabethan farmhouse east of the small town of Lewes. Charleston quickly became the Bloomsbury Group's new base, as John Maynard Keynes and Duncan Grant also moved in.

By 1916 it was evident that Hogarth's greatest asset, and Bloomsbury's most uncompromising voice, was Virginia herself, who had turned her attention from being a publisher to being a writer.

The rest, as they say, is history.

From Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" to the novels of Woolf, Eliot and Forster, from Vanessa and Duncan's designs that became the very definition of 1920's English art, to Ottoline Morrell's patronage and protection of everyone from Henry Moore to D.H. Lawrence, a world without the influence of Bloomsbury is completely unthinkable. To say nothing of the sexual and intellectual revolutions that they initiated.

Of all artistic movements in the last two centuries, Bloomsbury came closest to realising the visionary utopia of Blake's Jerusalem. They set the world alight with new ideas, and they did it selflessly and with love and passion.

And it all started 100 years ago today, over tea and, probably, cakes.


Virginia Woolf


"When the new age is at leisure to pronounce, all will be set right... Inspired Men will hold their proper rank, and the Daughters of Memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration. Rouse up, O Young Men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings! Painters! On you I call. Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fashionable fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works, or the expensive advertising boasts that they make of such works. They are a class of men whose whole delight is in destroying...if we are but just and true to our own Imaginations we shall live forever in Worlds of Eternity...

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land."

- William Blake, 1809