Dictionary of


Art  &  Artist




 

 Vanessa Bell

 

Vanessa Bell         Pages: 1



(b London, 30 May 1879; d Charleston, Firle, Sussex, 7 April 1961).

English painter. Daughter of the eminent literary critic Sir Leslie Stephen and his wife Julia Duckworth, Vanessa Bell inherited a High Victorian attitude to art against which she was to react. She trained as a painter under Arthur Cope (1857–1940), then at the Royal Academy Schools, where one of her tutors was John Singer Sargent. Family circumstances restricted the work of her early years, and not until 1906 did she begin to assert herself as an artist, forming the Friday Club in an attempt to create an atmosphere in London more conducive to painting. Her Iceland Poppies (1908; priv. col.), exhibited at the New English Art Club in the summer of 1909, was praised by Sickert and marks her artistic maturity. Its quiet, restrained naturalism was, however, to be exploded a year later by her experience of Post-Impressionism.
 

Nude
1922