Vanessa Bell was born </b>Vanessa Stephen
, the oldest daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Jackson''' (1846 - 1895), at 22 Hyde Park Gate,
London, where she lived until
1904. She was educated at home by her parents in languages, mathematics and history, and took drawing lessons from Ebenzer Cook before she attended Sir Arthur Cope's art school in
1896, then studied painting at the Royal Academy in
1901.
After the deaths of her mother in
1895 and her father
1904, Vanessa sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and moved to
Bloomsbury with her sister Virginia and brothers
Thoby (1880 - 1906) and
Adrian (1883 - 1948), where they met and began socialising with the artists, writers and intellectuals who would come to form the
Bloomsbury Group.
She married
Clive Bell in
1907 and they had two sons,
Julian (who died in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War at the age of 29), and
Quentin . The two had an
open marriage, both taking lovers throughout their life together. She had affairs with art critic
Roger Fry, and with the painter
Duncan Grant, with whom she had a daughter,
Angelica in
1918, whom Clive Bell raised as his own daughter. Clive Bell took writer and patron of the arts Mary Hutchinson, amongst others, as his lover.
http://www.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/bloomsburyhtml/group.htm
Vanessa, Clive, Duncan Grant and Duncan's lover
David Garnett moved to the
Sussex countryside shortly before the outbreak of
First World War, and settled at
Charleston Farmhouse near
Firle, East Sussex, where she and Grant painted and worked on commissions for the
Omega Workshops established by Roger Fry.
Vanessa Bell's significant paintings include
Studland Beach (1912),
The Tub (1918),
Interior with Two Women (1932), and portraits of Virginia Woolf (three in 1912), Aldous Huxley (1929-1930), and David Garnett (1916).
She is considered one of the major contributors to British portrait drawing and landscape art in the
20th century.
She is portrayed by British actress
Miranda Richardson in the
2002 film
The Hours alongside
Nicole Kidman as
Virginia Woolf.
