Bloomsbury : Vanessa Bell.

Vanessa Bell (née Stephen; 30 May 1879 – 7 April 1961) was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury group and the sister of Virginia Woolf.

Early life and education

Vanessa Stephen was the eldest daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Duckworth (1846–1895).^‪‬ The family, including her sister Virginia; brothers Thoby (1880–1906) and Adrian (1883–1948), and half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth, lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Westminster, London. She was educated at home in languages, mathematics and history, and took drawing lessons from Ebenezer Cook before she attended Sir Arthur Cope’s art school in 1896, and then studied painting at the Royal Academy in 1901.

In later life she claimed that during her childhood she had been sexually molested by her half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth.^‪

Private life

After the deaths of her mother in 1895 and her father in 1904, Vanessa sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and moved to Bloomsbury with Virginia and brothers Thoby and Adrian,^‪ where they met and began socialising with the artists, writers and intellectuals who would come to form the Bloomsbury Group. The Bloomsbury Group’s first Thursday evening meetings began at Bell’s house in Gordon Square.^‪

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 couple had an open marriage,^‪‬ both taking lovers throughout their lives. Bell 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 child.^‪

Vanessa, Clive, Duncan Grant and Duncan’s lover David Garnett moved to the Sussex countryside shortly before the outbreak of the 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. Her first solo exhibition was at the Omega Workshops in 1916.^‪

Art

In 1906, when Bell started to think of herself as an artist, she formed the Friday Club in order to create a place in London that was more favorable to painting.‬ Vanessa was encouraged by the Post-Impressionist exhibitions organized by Roger Fry and she copied their bright colors and bold forms in her artworks. In 1914, she turned to abstraction.^‪

Bell rejected the examples of Victorian narrative painting and rejected a discourse on the ideal and aberrant qualities of femininity. Some of Vanessa Bell’s works were related to her personal life.^‪ For example, her illustration for To the Lighthouse, the book by her sister, Virginia Woolf, which was not published until 1927, is about a beach with lighthouse that was a part of Bell’s and Woolf’s, childhood in St. Ives.^‪

Bell is one of the most celebrated painters of the Bloomsbury group. She exhibited in London and Paris during her lifetime, and has been praised for innovative works during her early maturity and for her contributions to design.^‪

Bell’s paintings include Studland Beach (1912),^‪ The Tub (1918), Interior with Two Women (1932), and portraits of her sister Virginia Woolf (three in 1912), Aldous Huxley (1929–1930), and David Garnett (1916).

Exhibitions

Bell’s first solo exhibition in 1916 was held in the Omega Workshop in London, a prominent place for exhibitions which supported young artists and introduced design work to the public. Bell became the director of the Omega Workshop around 1912

Design for Overmantel Mural (1913), oil on paper. It depicts herself and Molly McCarthy naked in Bell’s studio at 46 Gordon Square.

Street Corner Conversation (also created in 1913), features massive nudes with their schematic form being related to it.

Summer Camp (1913), oil on board, it was an extended illustration of the interchange of imagery between the artists work for the Omega Workshop and their easel painting. The origin of this painting is when Bell went on a summer camp organized at Brandon on the Norfolk-Suffolk border near Thetford. Summer Camp became part of the Bryan Ferry Collection.

By the Estuary (1915), oil on canvas, shows how the geometrical abstraction that distinguished Bell’s design for the Omega Workshop was also applied in her easel painting. In her wartime paintings, landscape is rarely seen in them. However, this modestly scaled landscape shows her fondness for charity of designs in which segments of contrasting but harmonious colour are not distracted by detail.

Nude with Poppies (1916), oil on canvas, is a preliminary design for a head board which Bell had painted for Mary Hutchinson. This painting is one of the few of the surviving number of projected designs that are still in existence of the decorated beds from the Omega Workshop period

Designs for a Screen: Figures by a Lake (1912), gouache on board, was influenced by Nabi paintings by Vuillard and Denis. This design for a three-part screen can be dated back to 1912 and might have been a part of Bell’s exhibit Design for Screen which was shown at the Friday Club Exhibition in February 1912.

Iceland Poppies (1908), was exhibited at the New English Art Club in the summer of 1909. It was praised by Walter Sickert and marks her artistic maturity.^‪

Media portrayal

Bell was portrayed by Janet McTeer in the 1995 Dora Carrington biopic Carrington, and by Miranda Richardson in the 2002 film The Hours.

Bell is the subject of Susan Sellers’ novel Vanessa and Virginia and of Priya Parmar’s novel “Vanessa and Her Sister”.

Bloomsbury : Leonard Woolf .

Leonard Sidney Woolf (25 November 1880 – 14 August 1969) was an English political theorist, author, publisher and civil servant, and husband of author Virginia Woolf.

Early life

Woolf was born in London, the third of ten children of Solomon Rees Sidney Woolf (known as Sidney Woolf), a barrister and Queen’s Counsel, and Marie (née de Jongh). His family was Jewish. After his father died in 1892 Woolf was sent to board at Arlington House School near Brighton, Sussex. From 1894 to 1899 he attended St Paul’s School, and in 1899 he won a classical scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge,^‪‬ where he was elected to the Cambridge Apostles. Other members included Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, GE Moore and EM Forster. Thoby Stephen, Virginia Stephen’s brother, was friendly with the Apostles, though not a member himself. Woolf was awarded his BA in 1902, but stayed for another year to study for the Civil Service examinations.

In October 1904 Woolf moved to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to become a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service, in Jaffna and later Kandy,^‪ and by August 1908 was named an assistant government agent in the Southern Province, where he administered the District of Hambantota. Woolf returned to England in May 1911 for a year’s leave. Instead, however, he resigned in early 1912 and that same year married Virginia Stephen (Virginia Woolf).

Together Leonard and Virginia Woolf became influential in the Bloomsbury group, which also included various other former Apostles.

In December 1917 Woolf became one of the co-founders of the 1917 Club, which met in Gerrard Street, Soho.

Writing

After marriage, Woolf turned his hand to writing and in 1913 published his first novel, The Village in the Jungle, which is based on his years in Sri Lanka. A series of books followed at roughly two-yearly intervals.

On the introduction of conscription in 1916, during the First World War, Woolf was rejected for military service on medical grounds, and turned to politics and sociology. He joined the Labour Party and the Fabian Society, and became a regular contributor to the New Statesman. In 1916 he wrote International Government, proposing an international agency to enforce world peace.

As his wife’s mental health worsened, Woolf devoted much of his time to caring for her (he himself suffered from depression). In 1917 the Woolfs bought a small hand-operated printing press and with it they founded the Hogarth Press. Their first project was a pamphlet, hand-printed and bound by themselves. Within ten years the Press had become a full-scale publishing house, issuing Virginia’s novels, Leonard’s tracts and, among other works, the first edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Woolf continued as the main director of the Press until his death. His wife suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, until her suicide by drowning in 1941. Later Leonard fell in love with a married artist, Trekkie Parsons.

In 1919 Woolf became editor of the International Review. He also edited the international section of the Contemporary Review from 1920 to 1922. He was literary editor of The Nation and Atheneum, generally referred to simply as The Nation, from 1923 to 1930), and joint founder and editor of The Political Quarterly from 1931 to 1959), and for a time he served as secretary of the Labour Party’s advisory committees on international and colonial questions.

In 1960 Woolf revisited Sri Lanka and was surprised at the warmth of the welcome he received, and even the fact that he was still remembered.^‪‬ Woolf accepted an honorary doctorate from the then-new University of Sussex in 1964 and in 1965 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He declined the offer of CH in the Queen’s Birthday honours list in 1966

Family

Among his nine siblings, Bella Woolf was also an author.

Death

Woolf died on 14 August 1969 from a stroke. He was cremated and his ashes were buried alongside his wife’s beneath an elm tree in his beloved garden at Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex. The tree subsequently blew down and Woolf’s remains have since been marked by a bronze bust.

His papers are held by the University of Sussex at Falmer.

Works

• The Village in the Jungle – 1913
• The Wise Virgins – 1914 (Republished in 2003 by Persephone Books)
• International Government – 1916
• The Future of Constantinople – 1917
• The Framework of a Lasting Peace – 1917
• Cooperation and the Future of Industry – 1918
• Economic Imperialism – 1920
• Empire and Commerce in Africa – 1920
• Socialism and Co-operation – 1921
• International co-operative trade – 1922
• Fear and Politics – 1925
• Essays on Literature, History, Politics – 1927
• Hunting the Highbrow – 1927
• Imperialism and Civilization – 1928
• After the Deluge (Principia Politica), 3 vols. – 1931, 1939, 1953
• Quack! Quack! – 1935
• Barbarians at the Gate – 1939
• The War for Peace – 1940
• A Calendar of Consolation – selected by Leonard Woolf, 1967

RHS Hampton Court 2015 Designers :Stuart Charles Towner & Bethany Williams

Designed by
Stuart Charles Towner & Bethany Williams
Built by
RDC Landscape Design & Construction, Kent
Sponsored by
Hadlow Group
The title of the garden – Green Seam – refers to regeneration and revitalisation of Betteshanger, a part of East Kent that has suffered a series of major economic and social setbacks following the abrupt closure of the last Kent coalfield in 1989. Led by Hadlow, one of the UK’s leading land-based colleges, the Betteshanger Sustainable Parks is a major £40m economic and social regeneration project including green technologies and sustainable business and commerce supported by world class research and development and education options.

While celebrating East Kent’s mining heritage, the garden depicts the transformation of the former colliery site into a green seam of sustainable hope, innovation and prosperity. The dark colliery spoil contrasts with the vivid greens and pinks of the plants and the garden shows how pioneer plant species, some of which are rare, can colonise apparently hostile environments such as spoil heaps and transform them into places of beauty.

RHS Chelsea 2015 Designers : Alan Gardner

The Viking Cruises garden celebrates the launch of Viking’s first ocean ship. It epitomises the elegant lines and style of this beautiful ship. The garden is designed to create a Scandinavian feel; clean and contemporary with a sleek finish. Movement is at its core, reflecting the graceful movement of a ship sailing through the rippling waters of great seas.

RHS Chelsea 2015 Designers : Andrew Wilson & Gavin McWilliam

Marking the 200th anniversary of Wellington’s victory at the Battle of Waterloo and Wellington’s College’s role as his living legacy, the garden progresses from the bleakness and brutality of the Battle of Waterloo 200 years ago, through the greening and flowering of the landscape towards an a representation of the iconic architecture of Wellington College, the memorial to the Duke of Wellington. The garden’s design reconciles the drama and violence of the battle with a progressive and positive future. Elements of the garden are inspired by the landscape and terrain of Waterloo which Wellington used to his advantage, the battle formations that successfully repelled attack, the regimental colours of British and Allied troops, the eight aptitudes central to the teaching of the College and the materiality of the College itself, marked with the personal carvings of current pupils and alumni.

RHS Chelsea 2015 Designers : Charlie Albone

Charlie Albone, an Australian-based designer has created his first RHS Chelsea Flower Show garden, a space to update his late father about his life since his father passed away. Aged just 17 when he lost his father, Charlie has been keen to tell his father about his life since. An emotive space, the garden has different sections, each telling the story. The first section celebrates life with beautiful, romantic planting; a water feature in the second section which is a space for reflection; and the third, at the rear of the garden, is an intimate space to sit, connect and communicate with loved ones. Varied textures and colours including silver, white, purple and pinks complement the hard landscaping with planting to be enjoyed and supply interest all year round with a highlight in spring.

RHS Chelsea 2015 Designers : Matthew Wilson

For the fifth year in a row, Royal Bank of Canada returns to RHS Chelsea Flower Show, this time with a contemporary garden from Matthew Wilson which explores living sustainably through good design and understanding the importance of conserving fresh water. The garden is divided into three main parts; a zero irrigation ‘dry garden’, central water harvesting/storage zone, and edible garden, with a raised seating and dining platform.

Matthew’s work on creating the Dry Garden at RHS Garden Hyde Hall and the RBC Blue Water Project has been the inspiration for his garden. Based around a series of curved beds and features, the garden represents the ebb and flow of water, creating a sheltered sunlit space. Drought-tolerant and sun-loving trees, shrubs and flowers form the planting for the garden which also has a small pond.

RHS Chelsea 2015 Designers : John Tan & Raymond Toh

This garden is John Tan and Raymond Toh’s debut at RHS Chelsea and is inspired by Kranji, a suburb of Singapore with a lush natural landscape home to tropical plants, orchid farms and nature reserve wetlands. Visitors to the show will be transported to tropical Singapore. With palms, coconuts and fig flanking the garden, ferns create an oasis secreting an orchid display. This is a secret garden filled with vibrant tropical plants and orchids. The orchids draw the visitors views along the pathways through the tropical planting and past a waterfall cascading over a green wall of ferns to a pond, and house with a roof garden with creepers flowing down.

RHS Chelsea 2015 Designers : Marcus Barnett

Marcus Barnett has designed a garden inspired by the De Stijl Movement. The garden reflects strong rectilinear geometry with coloured blocks contributing colour and textural relief, whether viewing from within or when viewed from above. Contrasting colours and tones surround a series of differing scaled waterways. Trees and hedges introduce vertical detailing, sculptural form and dappled shade.

Plants have been selected to provide harmonious tonal balance and textural contrast within rectilinear planting spaces. Vibrant primary colours and closely related tones used by the De Stijl Movement are emphasised, with restful and balancing foils of green and white

RHS Chelsea 2015 Designers : Matt Keightley

Designed by the 2014 BBC/RHS Chelsea People’s Choice winner Matthew Keightley, the garden celebrates the opening of the Mamohato Children’s centre in Lesotho, South Africa. Keightley has designed the garden to aims to raise awareness of Sentebale’s work in providing healthcare and education to Lesotho’s most vulnerable children. The garden will give visitors a taste of Lesotho and the bright, vibrant atmosphere of the Mamohato camp, and will include a rock and waterscape feature which is representative of the mountainous region in this part of South Africa.

The garden also surrounds a building, constructed using traditional materials and methods, which represents the entrance building to Mamohato Children’s centre, offering further shelter and security to the vulnerable children Sentebale helps.