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“... Its ‘vigorous vegetable growth’ (Frances Partridge’s description of Duncan Grant’s and Vanessa Bell’s decorations at Charleston) has been displayed and catalogued at the Crafts Council and Anthony d’Offay galleries. Judith Collins’s Omega Workshops gives the history, while Frances Spalding’s biography of ...”

“... its visual artists. They are understood only too well, and patronised with faint praise. Clive Bell’s ‘Significant Form’ is an aesthetic curiosity, Roger Fry’s influence as a theorist long ago terminated. The pictures and decorative work of the Bloomsbury English Modernists – Bell, Fry, Duncan Grant, Dora ...”

“... Bloomsbury moved momentarily right into the forefront of early Modernism. Both Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell immediately began making abstract collages, or ‘arrangements’ as they called them, using fabrics and papiers collés. Picasso himself, it should be noted, did not make the same move to abstraction in his own collages, and neither did Braque ...”

“... photograph of the exposed side wall of the house. Some of the panels that Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant had painted for the third-floor drawing room are, as Virginia told them, ‘still pendant’. ‘I cd just see a piece of my studio wall standing: otherwise rubble where I wrote so many books. Open air where we sat so many ...”

“... My grandmother was the painter Vanessa Bell. She died aged 81 when I was eight. I loved my grandmother, but 39 years later I have few memories of her. If, that is, a ‘memory’ is some kind of private mental property. The picture I have of her may be faintly tinted by first-hand experience, but its contours come from public documentation ...”

“... final years. She died in 1956 but is only now receiving her first retrospective, at Charleston, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s house in Sussex (until 30 August). The drawings and paintings selected were created between 1908 and 1928, Hamnett’s most prolific years, and are on show alongside two large portraits of her by Roger Fry and a bronze ...”

“... Julian Bell returned briefly to England in the spring of 1937. He was 29; he had been teaching in China for 18 months and was now determined to fight in Spain. Everyone knew this was his plan, or rather everyone except his mother, Vanessa, whom Julian had told that he might not go, that ‘of course it would depend on my persuading you ...”

“... Thomas’s cottage. As it was, she found herself in Bloomsbury. Even if they were, as Quentin Bell called them, ‘as amorphous as friends can be’, they were nearly all highly literate, and judged accordingly. They treated her as a kind of peg-top doll, a sailor doll with blue eyes, ‘a thought unnaturally wide open,’ or, at best, as a child. Neither ...”

“... commissioned by Kenneth and Jane Clark was a grand Wedgwood dinner service created by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in 1935. The two artists chose to paint the 48 plates (out of 140 pieces) with a series of portraits of great women, including Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf themselves. ‘It ought to ...”

“... and spots of nature which grow within a man marked for decline. Artists such as Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, John Piper and Graham Sutherland depart from his text, and while it is tempting to quote the manner of their going it is more illuminating to give a sample of the way in which he addresses himself to the much more difficult task of describing ...”

“... Clive Bell​ grew up in a grand house on the edge of a Wiltshire village, the younger son in a family whose upper-class existence was funded by the profits from Welsh coal mines. His early (and lasting) passions were hunting, fishing and shooting, but he also harboured literary ambitions. Arriving at Cambridge in 1899, he split his time between the rich sporting set and the intellectuals, befriending Thoby Stephen, who similarly bridged the two, and many of those who would come to form the Bloomsbury Group ...”

“... inconsistencies, but at a loss to know what to do. ‘The more I think of it,’ the newly married Vanessa Bell wrote, ‘the more it seems to me absurd that we should have … 5 servants to look after a young & able-bodied couple & a baby.’ ‘Why we have them I can’t think,’ Virginia lamented. ‘How terrible it is to be in this position.’ At ...”

“... It​ seems to be a foregone conclusion that Vanessa Bell isn’t much good. There are those devoted types, of course, for whom the sensibility of her paintings, as well as their subjects, makes them windows into a beloved world. But perhaps they are seeing something more than this. If so, it shouldn’t be surprising; they have been looking the longest ...”

“... have caused no consternation among listeners who included Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell. Nor, perhaps, would Forster’s own discomfort with the question of Sex, which played a large, complicated part in his own life: ‘You work it out,’ his essay goes on: ‘I can’t so well.’ Increasingly anguished by the implications of his ...”

“... by an Omega dinner service intended to celebrate famous women, badly painted in lugubrious hues by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. The essence of what he believed, that art is ‘a long word which stretches from millinery to religion’, is captured in an unfinished portrait of Marie Countess of Schaumburg-Lippe by Joshua Reynolds. The face has been ...”