People : Violet Trefusis . Vita’s True Love .

Violet Trefusis (née Keppel; 6 June 1894 – 29 February 1972) was an English writer and socialite. She is chiefly remembered for her lengthy affair with the poet Vita Sackville-West, which the two women continued after their respective marriages to men. Trefusis wrote novels and non-fiction works, both in English and French.

The affair was featured in novels by both parties, in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography, and in many letters and memoirs of the period, roughly 1912–1922. Many are preserved at Yale University Library. Trefusis also inspired other fiction and was featured as a pivotal character in these novels, including “Lady Montdore” in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate and “Muriel” in Harold Acton’s The Soul’s Gymnasium.

Early life

Born Violet Keppel, she was the daughter of Alice Keppel, later a mistress of King Edward VII of the United Kingdom, and her husband, The Hon. George Keppel, a son of the 7th Earl of Albemarle. But members of the Keppel family thought her biological father was William Beckett, subsequently 2nd Baron Grimthorpe, a banker and MP for Whitby.

Violet lived her early youth in London, where the Keppel family had a house in Portman Square. When she was four years old, her mother Alice Keppel became the favourite mistress of Albert Edward (Bertie), the Prince of Wales, who was crowned as King Edward VII on 22 January 1901. He paid visits to the Keppel household in the afternoon around tea-time, on a regular basis until the end of his life in 1910. (George Keppel, who was aware of the affair, was conveniently absent at these times.)

In 1900 Violet’s only sibling, Sonia, was born. (Sonia is the grandmother of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall and Violet was her great-aunt.)

Affair with Vita Sackville-West

Trefusis is best remembered today for her love affair with the wealthy Vita Sackville-West. Virginia Woolf described this by analogy in her novel Orlando. In this romanticized biography of Vita, Trefusis is represented by the Russian princess Sasha.

The two women both wrote fictional accounts that referred to this love affair (Challenge by Sackville-West and Broderie Anglaise a roman à clef in French by Trefusis). Sackville-West’s son Nigel Nicolson the non-fiction Portrait of a Marriage, based on material from his mother’s letters, and adding extensive “clarifications,” including some of his father’s point of view. Such works explored other aspects of the affair. Trefusis was also featured as a pivotal fictional character in other novels, including as “Lady Montdore” in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate and “Muriel” in Harold Acton’s The Soul’s Gymnasium.

Each of the participants left extensive written accounts in surviving letters and diaries. Apart from the two central players, Alice Keppel, Victoria Sackville-West, Harold Nicolson, Denys Trefusis and Pat Dansey also left documents that referred to the affair.

Diana Souhami’s Mrs Keppel and her Daughter (1997) provides an overview of the affair and of the main actors in the drama. When Violet was 10, she met Vita (who was two years older) for the first time. After that, they attended the same school for several years and soon recognised a bond between them. When Violet was 14, she confessed her love to Vita and gave her a ring. In 1910, after the death of Edward VII, Mrs Keppel made her family observe a “discretion” leave of about two years before re-establishing themselves in British society. When they returned to London, the Keppels moved to a house in Grosvenor Street. At that time, Violet learned that Vita was soon to be engaged to Harold Nicolson and was involved in an affair with Rosamund Grosvenor. Violet made it clear that she still loved Vita, but became engaged to make Vita jealous. This did not stop Vita from marrying Harold (in October 1913), nor did he curtail his own homosexual adventures after marriage.

In April 1918, Violet and Vita refreshed and intensified their bond. Vita had two sons by then, but she left them in the care of others while she and Violet took a holiday in Cornwall. Meanwhile Mrs Keppel was busy arranging a marriage for Violet with Denys Robert Trefusis (1890–1929), son of Colonel Hon. John Schomberg Trefusis and Eva Louisa Bontein. A few days after the armistice, Violet and Vita went to France for several months. Because of Vita’s exclusive claim, and her own loathing of marriage, Violet made Denys promise never to have sex with her as a condition for marriage. He apparently agreed as, on 16 June 1919, they married. At the end of that year, Violet and Vita made a new two-month excursion to France: ordered to do so by his mother-in-law, Denys retrieved Violet from the south of France when new gossip about her and Sackville-West’s loose behaviour began to reach London. The next time they left, in February 1920, was to be the final elopement. Sackville-West might still have had some doubts and probably hoped that Harold would interfere. Harold and Denys pursued the women, flying to France inn a two-seater airplane. The couples had heated scenes in Amiens.

The climax came when Harold told Vita that Violet had been unfaithful to her (with Denys). Violet tried to explain and assured Vita of her innocence (which was in all likelihood true). Vita was much too angry and upset to listen, and fled saying she couldn’t bear to see Violet for at least two months. Six weeks later Vita returned to France to meet Violet. Mrs Keppel desperately tried to keep the scandal away from London, where Violet’s sister, Sonia, was about to be married (to Roland Cubitt). Violet spent much of 1920 abroad, clinging desperately to Vita via continuous letters. In January 1921, Vita and Violet made a final journey to France, where they spent six weeks together. At this time, Harold threatened to break off the marriage if Vita continued her escapades. When Vita returned to England in March, it was practically the end of the affair. Violet was sent to Italy; and, from there she wrote her last desperate letters to their mutual friend Pat Dansey, having been forbidden from writing directly to Vita. At the end of the year, Violet had to face the facts and start to build her life from scratch.

The two former lovers met again in 1940, after the progress of World War II forced Trefusis to return to England. The women continued to keep in touch and send each other affectionate letters.

Career

During the Second World War in London, Trefusis participated in the broadcasting of “La France Libre”, which earned her a Legion d’Honneur after the war; she was also made a Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

Trefusis received mixed reviews on her books. Some critics credited Trefusis with an “excellent gift of observation” and a “talent for mimicry and flair for decor in most of her books.” These qualities were evident in her novels written in English and in French. Other critics stated that her books were not great literature, although they sold well and her readers enjoyed them.

She made many appearances as a pivotal character in other writers’ fiction. Nancy Mitford based “Lady Montdore”, a character in her novel Love in a Cold Climate, on Trefusis. She featured in Cyril Connolly’s The Rock Pool, in Harold Acton’s The Soul’s Gymnasium as “Muriel”, in several novels by Vita Sackville-West, and in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography as the ravishing “Princess Sasha”.

Although her writings spanned much of the twentieth century, many were unpublished. Virago, a publishing house devoted to recovering the forgotten work of women writers, set about putting matters right. They brought out two of her novels with introductions by Lorna Sage and Lisa St Aubin de Teran, but were eventually defeated by copyright difficulties. In addition, Lorna Sage, Trefusis’ great champion among British critics, died before she could assist in the publication of further works by Trefusis, as she planned.

Later life in France

From 1923 on, Trefusis was one of the many lovers of the Singer sewing machine heiress Winnaretta Singer, daughter of Isaac Singer and wife of the homosexual Prince Edmond de Polignac, who introduced her to the artistic beau-monde in Paris. Trefusis conceded more and more to her mother’s model of being “socially acceptable” but, at the same time, not wavering in her sexuality. Singer, like Sackville-West before her, dominated the relationship, though apparently to mutual satisfaction. The two were together for many years and seem to have been content. Trefusis’s mother, Alice Keppel, did not object to this affair, most likely because of Singer’s wealth and power, and the fact that Singer carried on the affair in a much more disciplined way. Trefusis seemed to prefer the role of the submissive and therefore fitted well with Singer, who, whip in hand, was typically dominant and in control in her relationships. Neither was completely faithful during their long affair, but, unlike Trefusis’s affair with Sackville-West, this seems to have had no negative effect on their understanding.

In 1924, Mrs Keppel bought L’Ombrellino, a large villa overlooking Florence, where Galileo Galilei had once lived. After her parents’ death in 1947, Trefusis would become the chatelaine of L’Ombrellino till the end of her life. In 1929, Denys Trefusis died, completely estranged from his seemingly unfeeling wife. After his death,Trefusis published several novels, some in English, some in French, that she had written in her medieval “Tour” in Saint-Loup-de-Naud, Seine-et-Marne, France – a gift from Winnaretta.

Joseph Alsop, an American journalist, recounts in his autobiography a meeting with Violet in Florence. “Mrs. Trefusis’s enthusiasms had long since inspired the rhyme ‘Mrs Trefusis never refuses.’ Governor Olson, as it turned out was not refused . . . they were much cheered up by one another.”

Nancy Mitford said that Trefusis’s autobiography should be titled Here Lies Violet Trefusis, and partly based the character of Lady Montdore in Love in a Cold Climate on her.

François Mitterrand, who later became President of the French Republic in 1981, in his chronicle La Paille & le Grain, mentions his friendship with Violet Trefusis under 2 March 1972, when he received “the telegram” informing of her death. He goes on to discuss how, before Christmas 1971, he went to Florence to visit her as he knew she was in her last months of life: he had dinner with Violet Trefusis and Frank Ashton-Gwatkin, who was a member of the British Government at the beginning of the Second World War, at her house in Florence.

Death and legacy

Trefusis died at L’Ombrellino on the Bellosguardo on 29 February 1972. She died of starvation, the effect of a malabsorption disease. Her ashes were placed both in Florence at the Cimitero degli Allori (The Evangelical Cemetery of Laurels) and in Saint-Loup-de-Naud in the monks’ refectory near her tower.

In the 1990 BBC Mini-series Portrait of a Marriage, Violet Trefusis is portrayed by Cathryn Harrison.

Writings

Novels

• Sortie de secours (1929)
• Écho (1931)
• Tandem (1933)
• Broderie Anglaise (1939–1945)
• Hunt the Slipper
• Pirates at play
• Les causes perdues (1940)

Memoirs

• Prelude to Misadventure (1941)
• Don’t look Round (1952)

Last works

• Memoirs of an armchair (1960)
• From Dusk to Dawn (last work, 1972)

Unpublished / other

• The Hook in the Heart (n.d.)
• Instants de mémoire (Gestes)
• La chèvre et le chou (n.d.)
• The Shortcut
• Les sœurs ennemies (c. 1940s?)
• The End Justifies the Means (c. 1947)
• All Glorious Within (n.d.)
• Alas, A Lady! (n.d.)
• Father and Daughter. The Seducer
• Irène et Pénélope
• The Sleeper (n.d.)
• A Tooth for a Tooth(n.d.)

Artists: Tamara De Limpicka, The Art Deco Queen

paris 1919-1939

Tamara Łempicka, commonly known as Tamara de Lempicka (16 May 1898 – 18 March 1980) was a Polish Art Deco painter and “the first woman artist to be a glamour star”. Influenced by Cubism, Lempicka became the leading representative of the Art Deco style across two continents, a favorite artist of many Hollywood stars, referred to as ‘the baroness with a brush’. She was the most fashionable portrait painter of her generation among the haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy, painting duchesses and grand dukes and socialites. Through her network of friends, she was also able to display her paintings in the most elite salons of the era. Lempicka was criticized as well as admired for her ‘perverse Ingrism’, referring to her modern restatement of the master Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, as displayed in her work Group of Four Nudes (1925) among other studies.

Life

She was born Maria Górska in Warsaw, Congress Poland under the rulership of the Russian Empire, into a wealthy and prominent family. Lempicka was the daughter of Boris Gurwik-Górski, a Russian Jewish attorney for a French trading company, and Malwina Dekler, a Polish socialite who met him at one of the European spas. Maria had two siblings and was the middle child. She attended a boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, and spent the winter of 1911 with her grandmother in Italy and on the French Riviera, where she was treated to her first taste of the Great Masters of Italian painting. In 1912, her parents divorced, and Maria went to live with her rich Aunt Stefa in St. Petersburg, Russia. When her mother remarried, she became determined to break away to make a life of her own. In 1913, at the age of fifteen, while attending the opera, Maria spotted the man she became determined to marry. She promoted her campaign through her well-connected uncle, and in 1916 she married Tadeusz Łempicki (1888–1951) in St. Petersburg—a well-known ladies’ man, gadabout, and lawyer by title, who was tempted by the significant dowry.

In 1917, during the Russian Revolution, Tadeusz Łempicki was arrested in the dead of night by the Bolsheviks. Maria searched the prisons for him and after several weeks, with the help of the Swedish consul, she secured his release. They traveled to Copenhagen then to London and finally to Paris, to where Maria’s family had also escaped.

Paris and painting

In Paris, the Lempickis lived for a while from the sale of family jewels. Tadeusz proved unwilling or unable to find suitable work, which added to the domestic strain, while Maria gave birth to Kizette Lempicka. Her sister, the designer Adrienne Gorska, made furniture for her Paris apartment and studio in the Art Deco style, complete with chrome-plated furniture. The flat at 7 Rue Mechain was built by the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens known for his clean lines.

Lempicka’s distinctive and bold artistic style developed quickly, influenced by what André Lhote sometimes referred to as “soft cubism” and by the “synthetic cubism” of Maurice Denis, epitomizing the cool yet sensual side of the Art Deco movement. For her, Picasso “embodied the novelty of destruction”. She thought that many of the Impressionists drew badly and employed “dirty” colors. Lempicka’s technique would be novel, clean, precise, and elegant.

For her first major show, in Milan, Italy in 1925, under the sponsorship of Count Emmanuele Castelbarco, Lempicka painted 28 new works in six months. A portrait would take three weeks of work, allowing for the nuisance of dealing with a difficult sitter; by 1927, Lempicka could charge 50,000 French francs for a portrait, a sum equal to about US$2,000 then and more than ten times as much today. Through Castelbarco, she was introduced to Italy’s great man of letters and notorious lover, Gabriele d’Annunzio. She visited the poet twice at his villa on Lake Garda, seeking to paint his portrait; he in turn was set on seduction. After her unsuccessful attempts to secure the commission, she went away angry, while d’Annunzio also remained unsatisfied.

In 1925, Lempicka painted her iconic work Auto-Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti) for the cover of the German fashion magazine Die Dame. As summed up by the magazine Auto-Journal in 1974, “the self-portrait of Tamara de Lempicka is a real image of the independent woman who asserts herself. Her hands are gloved, she is helmeted, and inaccessible; a cold and disturbing beauty [through which] pierces a formidable being—this woman is free!” In 1927 Lempicka won her first major award, the first prize at the Exposition Internationale des Beaux Arts in Bordeaux, France, for her portrait of Kizette on the Balcony.

The Roaring Twenties

In Paris during the Roaring Twenties, Tamara de Lempicka became part of the bohemian life: she knew Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide. Famous for her libido, she was bisexual. Her affairs with both men and women were conducted in ways that were considered scandalous at the time. She often used formal and narrative elements in her portraits, and her nude studies produced overpowering effects of desire and seduction. In the 1920s she became closely associated with lesbian and bisexual women in writing and artistic circles, such as Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West, and Colette. She also became involved with Suzy Solidor, a night club singer at the Boîte de Nuit, whose portrait she later painted. Her husband eventually tired of their arrangement and abandoned her in 1927. They were divorced in 1931 in Paris.

Obsessed with her work and her social life, Lempicka neglected more than her husband; she rarely saw her daughter. When Kizette was not away at boarding school (France or England), the girl was often with her grandmother Malvina. When Lempicka informed her mother and daughter that she would not be returning from America for Christmas in 1929, Malvina was so angry that she burned Lempicka’s enormous collection of designer hats; Kizette watched them burn, one by one.

Kizette was neglected, but also immortalized. Lempicka painted her only child repeatedly, leaving a striking portrait series: Kizette in Pink, 1926; Kizette on the Balcony, 1927; Kizette Sleeping, 1934; Portrait of Baroness Kizette, 1954–5, etc. In other paintings, the women depicted tend to resemble Kizette.

In 1928, her longtime patron the Baron Raoul Kuffner von Diószeg (1886–1961) visited her studio and commissioned her to paint his mistress. Lempicka finished the portrait, then took the mistress’ place in the Baron’s life. She travelled to the United States for the first time in 1929, to paint a commissioned portrait for Rufus T. Bush and to arrange a show of her work at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. The show went well but the money she earned was lost when the bank she used collapsed following the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

Lempicka continued both her heavy workload and her frenetic social life through the next decade. The Great Depression had little effect on her; in the early 1930s she was painting King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Queen Elizabeth of Greece. Museums began to collect her works. In 1933 she traveled to Chicago where she worked with Georgia O’Keeffe, Santiago Martínez Delgado and Willem de Kooning. Her social position was cemented when she married her lover, Baron Kuffner, on 3 February 1934 in Zurich (his wife had died the year before). The Baron took her out of her quasi-bohemian life and finally secured her place in high society again, with a title to boot. She repaid him by convincing him to sell many of his estates in Eastern Europe and move his money to Switzerland. She saw the coming of World War II from a long way off, much sooner than most of her contemporaries. She did make a few concessions to the changing times as the decade passed; her art featured a few refugees and common people, and even a Christian saint or two, as well as the usual aristocrats and cold nudes.

Later life

In the winter of 1939, Lempicka and her husband started an “extended vacation” in the United States. She immediately arranged for a show of her work in New York, though the Baron and Baroness chose to settle in Beverly Hills, California, living in the former residence of Hollywood director King Vidor. She cultivated a Garboesque manner. The Baroness would visit the Hollywood stars on their studio sets, such as Tyrone Power, Walter Pidgeon, and George Sanders and they would come to her studio to see her at work. She did war relief work, like many others at the time; and she managed to get Kizette out of Nazi-occupied Paris, via Lisbon, in 1941. Some of her paintings of this time had a Salvador Dalí quality, as displayed in Key and Hand, 1941. In 1943, the couple relocated to New York City. Even though she continued to live in style, socializing continuously, her popularity as a society painter had diminished greatly. They traveled to Europe frequently to visit fashionable spas and so that the Baron could attend to Hungarian refugee work. For a while, she continued to paint in her trademark style, although her range of subject matter expanded to include still lifes, and even some abstracts. Yet eventually she adopted a new style, using palette knife instead of brushes. Her new work was not well received when she exhibited in 1962 at the Iolas Gallery. Lempicka determined never to show her work again, and retired from active life as a professional artist.

Insofar as she still painted at all, Lempicka sometimes reworked earlier pieces in her new style. The crisp and direct Amethyste (1946), for example, became the pink and fuzzy Girl with Guitar (1963). She showcased at the Ror Volmar Gallery in Paris from 30 May to 17 June 1961.

After Baron Kuffner’s death from a heart attack on 3 November 1961 on the ocean liner Liberté en route to New York, she sold most of her possessions and made three around-the-world trips by ship. Finally Lempicka moved to Houston, Texas to be with Kizette and her family. (Kizette had married a man named Harold Foxhall, who was then chief geologist for the Dow Chemical Company; they had two daughters.) There she began her difficult and disagreeable later years. Kizette served as Tamara’s business manager, social secretary, and factotum, and suffered under her mother’s controlling domination and petulant behavior. Tamara complained that not only were the paints and other artists’ materials now inferior to the “old days” but that people in the 1970s lacked the special qualities and “breeding” that inspired her art. The artistry and craftsmanship of her glory days were unrecoverable. In 1978 Tamara moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, to live among an aging international set and some of the younger aristocrats. After Kizette’s husband died of cancer, she attended her mother for three months until Tamara died in her sleep on March 18, 1980. She was cremated and her ashes were scattered over the volcano of Popocatepetl on 27 March 1980 by her Mexican friend Victor Manuel Contreras and her daughter Kizette.

Lempicka lived long enough for the wheel of fashion to turn a full circle: before she died a new generation had discovered her art and greeted it with enthusiasm. A retrospective in 1973 drew positive reviews. At the time of her death, her early Art Deco paintings were being shown and purchased once again. A stage play, Tamara, was inspired by her meeting with Gabriele D’Annunzio and was first staged in Toronto; it then ran in Los Angeles for eleven years (1984–1995) at the VFW Post, making it the longest running play in Los Angeles, and some 240 actors were employed over the years. The play was also subsequently produced at the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City. In 2005, the actress and artist Kara Wilson performed Deco Diva, a one-woman stage play based on Lempicka’s life. Her life and her relationship with one of her models is fictionalized in Ellis Avery’s novel The Last Nude, which won the American Library Association Stonewall Book Awards Barbara Gittings Literature Award for 2013.

Legacy

American singer-songwriter and actress Madonna is an admirer and collector of Lempicka’s work and has lent paintings to events and museums. Madonna has also featured Lempicka’s work in her music videos “Open Your Heart” (1987), “Express Yourself” (1989), “Vogue” (1990) and “Drowned World/Substitute for Love” (1998). She also used paintings by Lempicka on the sets of her 1987 Who’s That Girl and 1990 Blond Ambition world tours.

Other notable Lempicka collectors include actor Jack Nicholson and singer-actress Barbra Streisand.

Bloomsbury : The Omega Workshops.

(c) University of Leeds Art Collection and Gallery; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

The Omega Workshops Ltd. was a design enterprise founded by members of the Bloomsbury Group and established in July 1913.‬ It was located at 33 Fitzroy Square in London, and was founded with the intention of providing graphic expression to the essence of the Bloomsbury ethos.^‪ The Workshops were also closely associated with the Hogarth Press and the artist and critic Roger Fry, who was the principal figure behind the project, believed that artists could design, produce and sell their own works, and that writers could also be their own printers and publishers.^‪ The Directors of the firm were Fry, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.^‪

Beginnings

Fry aimed to remove what he considered to be the false divisions between the decorative and fine arts, and to give his artist friends an additional income opportunity in designing furniture, textiles and other household accessories. Fry was keen to encourage a Post-Impressionist influence in designs produced for Omega. However, Cubist and Fauvist influences are also apparent, particularly in many of the textile designs.

To ensure items were bought only for the quality of the work, and not the reputation of the artist, Fry insisted works be shown anonymously, marked only with the letter omega. The products were in general expensive, and aimed at an exclusive market.

Designers and manufacturers

In addition to offering a wide range of individual products, such as painted furniture, painted murals, mosaics, stained glass, and textiles, Omega Workshops offered interior design themes for various living spaces. A commission was taken to decorate a room for the 1913 Ideal Home Exhibition, and an illustrated catalogue, including text written by Fry, was published in autumn 1914.

Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant produced designs for Omega, and Wyndham Lewis was initially part of the operation. Lewis, however, split off at an early stage, taking with him several other participants to start the rival decorative workshop Rebel Art Centre after accusing Fry of misappropriating a commission to decorate a room at the Ideal Home Exhibition in the autumn of 1913. In October 1913, Wyndham Lewis, Frederick Etchells, Edward Wadsworth and Cuthbert Hamilton announced their resignation from Omega in a letter, known as the ‘Round Robin’, to its shareholders and patrons. This letter contained accusations particularly against Fry, criticising the workshop’s products and ideology. This split led to the formation not only of the Rebel Art Centre, but also of the Vorticist movement.

Most manufacturing for Omega was outsourced to professional craftsmen, such as J. Kallenborn & Sons of Stanhope Street, London, for marquetry furniture and Dryad Limited of Leicester for tall cane-seat chairs.^‪‬ A company in France was used to manufacture early printed linens.

In the autumn of 1913 Fry, who also created the designs for Omega’s tall cane-seat chairs, started designing and making pottery. After he considered book design and publishing in July 1915, the superintendent of printing at Central School of Arts and Crafts collaborated with Omega in designing four books that were later outsourced for printing. The management of the Omega Workshop was passed to Winifred Gill from 1914 as the men started to become involved in the First World War. ^‪

One artist exhibitions included those of Edward McKnight Kauffer, Alvaro Guevara, Mikhail Larionov and Vanessa Bell’s first solo exhibition in 1916.^‪

The range of products continued to increase throughout Omega Workshops’ six-year existence, and in April 1915 Vanessa Bell began using Omega fabrics in dress design, after which dressmaking became a successful part of the business.

Edward Wolfe worked at the Omega Workshops, hand-painting candle-shades and trays, and decorating furniture. Wolfe, who died in 1982, was one of the last of the Bloomsbury painters.

In January 1918, Omega were commissioned to design sets and costumes in the Israel Zangwill play Too Much Money.

Closure and legacy

Omega closed in 1919, after a clearance sale, and was officially liquidated on 24 July 1920. A series of poor financial decisions and internal conflicts all contributed to its decline. At the time of its closure, Fry was the only remaining original member working regularly at the workshop. Despite this, Omega became influential in interior design in the 1920s.

A revival of interest in Omega designs in the 1980s led to a reassessment of the place of the Bloomsbury Group in visual arts.

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 : John Maynard Keynes.

by Unknown photographer, bromide print, 1933

John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes,^‪ CB, FBA (5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946), was a British economist whose ideas fundamentally affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and is widely considered to be one of the most influential economists of the 20th century and the founder of modern macroeconomics.‬ His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics and its various offshoots.

In the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, challenging the ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. He instead argued that aggregate demand determined the overall level of economic activity and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. According to Keynesian economics, state intervention was necessary to moderate “boom and bust” cycles of economic activity.^‪ Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. Following the outbreak of World War II, Keynes’ ideas concerning economic policy were adopted by leading Western economies. In 1942, Keynes was awarded a hereditary peerage as Baron Keynes of Tilton in the County of Sussex.^‪‬ Keynes died in 1946; but, during the 1950s and 1960s, the success of Keynesian economics resulted in almost all capitalist governments adopting its policy recommendations.

Keynes’s influence waned in the 1970s, partly as a result of problems with inflation that began to afflict the Anglo-American economies from the start of the decade and partly because of critiques from Milton Friedman and other economists who were pessimistic about the ability of governments to regulate the business cycle with fiscal policy.^‪‬ However, the advent of the global financial crisis of 2007–08 caused a resurgence in Keynesian thought. Keynesian economics provided the theoretical underpinning for economic policies undertaken in response to the crisis by President Barack Obama of the United States, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, and other heads of governments.^‪

In 1999, Time magazine included Keynes in their list of the 100 most important and influential people of the 20th century, commenting that: “His radical idea that governments should spend money they don’t have may have saved capitalism.”^‪ He has been described by The Economist as “Britain’s most famous 20th-century economist.” In addition to being an economist, Keynes was also a civil servant, a director of the Bank of England, a part of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals,^‪‬ a patron of the arts and an art collector, a director of the British Eugenics Society, an advisor to several charitable trusts, a successful private investor, a writer, a philosopher, and a farmer.

Keynes’s early romantic and sexual relationships were exclusively with men.^‪‬ Keynes had been in relationships while at Eton and Cambridge; significant among these early partners were Dilly Knox and Daniel Macmillan.^‪ Keynes was open about his affairs, and between 1901 to 1915, kept separate diaries in which he tabulated his many sexual encounters.^‪‬ Keynes’s relationship and later close friendship with Macmillan was to be fortuitous, as Macmillan’s company first published his tract, Economic Consequences of the Peace.^‪‬

Attitudes in the Bloomsbury Group, in which Keynes was avidly involved, were relaxed about homosexuality. Keynes, together with writer Lytton Strachey, had reshaped the Victorian attitudes of the Cambridge Apostles: “since [their] time, homosexual relations among the members were for a time common”, wrote Bertrand Russell.^‪The artist Duncan Grant, whom he met in 1908, was one of Keynes’s great loves. Keynes was also involved with Lytton Strachey,^‪‬ though they were for the most part love rivals, and not lovers. Keynes had won the affections of Arthur Hobhouse,^‪‬ as well as Grant, both times falling out with a jealous Strachey for it.^‪ Strachey had previously found himself put off by Keynes, not least because of his manner of “treat[ing] his love affairs statistically”.^‪

Political opponents have used Keynes’ sexuality to attack his academic work.^‪ One line of attack held that he was uninterested in the long term ramifications of his theories because he had no children.^‪

Keynes’ friends in the Bloomsbury Group were initially surprised when, in his later years, he began dating and pursuing affairs with women,^‪‬ demonstrating himself to be bisexual.^‪‬ Ray Costelloe (who would later marry Oliver Strachey) was an early heterosexual interest of Keynes.^‪ In 1906, Keynes had written of this infatuation that, “I seem to have fallen in love with Ray a little bit, but as she isn’t male I haven’t [been] able to think of any suitable steps to take.”^‪

Throughout his life, Keynes worked energetically for the benefit both of the public and his friends; even when his health was poor, he laboured to sort out the finances of his old college,^‪ and at Bretton Woods he worked to institute an international monetary system that would be beneficial for the world economy. Keynes suffered a series of heart attacks, which ultimately proved fatal, beginning during negotiations for an Anglo-American loan in Savannah, Georgia, where he was trying to secure favourable terms for the United Kingdom from the United States, a process he described as “absolute hell”.^‪‬ A few weeks after returning from the United States, Keynes died of a heart attack at Tilton, his farmhouse home near Firle, East Sussex, England, on 21 April 1946 at the age of 62.^‪

Both of Keynes’s parents outlived him: his father John Neville Keynes (1852–1949) by three years, and his mother Florence Ada Keynes (1861–1958) by twelve. Keynes’s brother Sir Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982) was a distinguished surgeon, scholar, and bibliophile. His nephews include Richard Keynes (1919–2010) (a physiologist) and Quentin Keynes (1921–2003) (an adventurer and bibliophile). His widow, Lydia Lopokova, died in 1981. Keynes had no children.

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

People : Bloomsbury, Duncan Grant

Duncan James Corrowr Grant (21 January 1885 – 8 May 1978) was a British painter and designer of textiles, pottery and theatre sets and costumes. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group.

His father was Bartle Grant, a “poverty-stricken” major in the army, and much of his early childhood was spent in India and Burma. He was a grandson of Sir John Peter Grant, 12th Laird of Rothiemurchus, KCB, GCMG, sometime Lt-Governor of Bengal.^‪ Duncan was also the first cousin twice removed of John Grant, 13th Earl of Dysart (b. 1946).

Early life

Grant was born on 21 January 1885 in Rothiemurchus, Aviemore, Scotland. He attended school in England from 1894, where he was educated at Hillbrow School, a preparatory school in Rugby, and St Paul’s School, London. Grant showed little enthusiasm for studying but enjoyed art classes. He was encouraged by his art teacher and also his aunt Lady Strachey, who organised private drawing lessons for him. Eventually, he was allowed to follow his desire to become an artist, rather than join the army as his father wished, and he attended Westminster School of Art in 1902. He then studied art at the Slade School and in Italy and Paris.

He was a cousin, and for some time a lover, of Lytton Strachey. Through the Stracheys, Duncan was introduced to the Bloomsbury Group, where John Maynard Keynes became another of his lovers.

Career in art

Grant is best known for his painting style, which developed in the wake of French post-impressionist exhibitions mounted in London in 1910. He often worked with, and was influenced by, another member of the group, art critic and artist Roger Fry. As well as painting landscapes and portraits, Fry designed textiles and ceramics.

After Fry founded the Omega Workshops in 1913, Grant became co-director with Vanessa Bell, who was then involved with Fry. Although Grant had always been actively homosexual, a relationship with Vanessa blossomed, which was both creative and personal, and he eventually moved in with her and her two sons by her husband Clive Bell. In 1916, in support of his application for recognition as a conscientious objector, Grant joined his new lover, David Garnett, in setting up as fruit farmers in Suffolk. Both their applications were initially unsuccessful, but eventually the Central Tribunal agreed to recognise them on condition of their finding more appropriate premises. Vanessa Bell found the house named Charleston near Firle in Sussex. Relationships with Clive Bell remained amicable, and Bell stayed with them for long periods fairly often – sometimes accompanied by his own mistress, Mary Hutchinson.

In 1935 Grant was selected along with nearly 30 other prominent British artists of the day to provide works of art for the RMS Queen Mary then being built in Scotland. Grant was commissioned to provide paintings and fabrics for the first class Main Lounge. In early 1936, after his work was installed in the Lounge, directors from the Cunard Line made a walk-through inspection of the ship. When they saw what Grant had created, they immediately rejected his works and ordered it removed.

Grant is quoted in the book The Mary: The Inevitable Ship, by Potter and Frost, as saying:

“I was not only to paint some large murals to go over the fireplaces, but arrange for the carpets, curtains, textiles, all of which were to be chosen or designed by me. After my initial designs had been passed by the committee I worked on the actual designs for four months. I was then told the committee objected to the scale of the figures on the panels. I consented to alter these, and although it entailed considerable changes, I got a written assurance that I should not be asked to make further alterations. I carried on, and from that time my work was seen constantly by the Company’s (Cunard’s) representative.

When it was all ready I sent the panels to the ship to put the finishing touches to them when hanging. A few days later I received a visit from the Company’s man, who told me that the Chairman had, on his own authority, turned down the panels, refusing to give any reason.

From then on, nothing went right. My carpet designs were rejected and my textiles were not required. The whole thing had taken me about a year….. I never got any reason for the rejection of my work. The company simply said they were not suitable, paid my fee, and that was that.”

Personal life

Duncan’s early affairs were exclusively homosexual. These included his cousin, the writer Lytton Strachey, the future politician Arthur Hobhouse and the economist John Maynard Keynes, who at one time considered Grant the love of his life. Through Strachey, Grant became involved in the Bloomsbury Group, where he made many such great friends including Vanessa Bell. He would eventually live with Vanessa Bell, who though she was a married woman fell deeply in love with him, and one night succeeded in seducing him; Vanessa very much wanted a child by Duncan, and became pregnant in the spring of 1918. Although it is generally assumed that Duncan’s sexual relations with Vanessa ended in the months before Angelica was born (Christmas, 1918), they continued to live together for more than 40 years.

Living with Vanessa was no impediment to Duncan’s relationships with men, either before or after Angelica was born. Angelica grew up believing that Vanessa’s husband Clive Bell was her father; she bore his surname and his behaviour toward her never indicated otherwise. Duncan and Vanessa formed an open relationship, although she herself apparently never took advantage of this after settling down with him and having their child. Duncan, in contrast, had many physical affairs and several serious relationships with other men, most notably David Garnett, who would one day marry Angelica. Duncan’s love and respect for Vanessa, however, kept him with her until her death in 1961.

Angelica wrote: “(Grant) was a homosexual with bisexual leanings”.^‪

Later years

In Grant’s later years, his lover the poet Paul Roche (1916–2007), whom he had known since 1946, took care of him and enabled Grant to maintain his accustomed way of life at Charleston for many years. Roche was made co-heir of Grant’s estate. Grant eventually died in Roche’s home in 1978.

Duncan Grant’s remains are buried beside Vanessa Bell’s in the churchyard of St. Peter’s Church, West Firle, East Sussex.

People : Bloomsbury , Dora Carrington

Dora de Houghton Carrington (29 March 1893 – 11 March 1932), known generally as Carrington, was a British painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey.

Early life

The daughter of a Liverpool merchant, she was born in Hereford, England, and attended the all-girls’ Bedford High School which emphasized art. Her parents also paid for her to receive extra lessons in drawing. She went to the Slade School of Art at University College, London where she subsequently won a scholarship; her fellow students included Paul Nash, Christopher R. W. Nevinson and Mark Gertler. All at one time or another were in love with her, as was Nash’s younger brother John Nash, who hoped to marry her. Gertler pursued Carrington for a number of years, and they had a brief sexual relationship during the years of the First World War.

From her time at the Slade onwards, she was commonly known simply by her surname. She was not well known as a painter during her lifetime, as she rarely exhibited and did not sign her work. She worked for a while at the Omega Workshops, and for the Hogarth Press, designing woodcuts.

Career and personal life

Carrington was not a member of the Bloomsbury Group, though she was closely associated with Bloomsbury and, more generally, with “Bohemian” attitudes, through her long relationship with the homosexual writer Lytton Strachey, whom she first met in 1916. Distinguished by her cropped pageboy hair style (before it was fashionable) and somewhat androgynous appearance, she was troubled by her sexuality; she is known to have had at least two lesbian affairs (with Henrietta Bingham and Lady Ottoline Morrell). She also had a significant relationship with the writer Gerald Brenan.

In June 1918, Virginia Woolf wrote of Carrington in her diary: “She is odd from her mixture of impulse & self consciousness. I wonder sometimes what she’s at: so eager to please, conciliatory, restless, & active…. [B]ut she is such a bustling eager creature, so red & solid, & at the same time inquisitive, that one can’t help liking her.”Carrington first set up house with Lytton Strachey in November 1917, when they moved together to Tidmarsh Mill House, near Pangbourne, Berkshire. Carrington met Ralph Partridge, an Oxford friend of her younger brother Noel, in 1918. Partridge fell in love with Carrington and eventually, in 1921, Carrington agreed to marry him, not for love but to hold the menage a trois together. Strachey paid for the wedding, and also accompanied the couple on their honeymoon in Venice. The three moved to Ham Spray House in Wiltshire in 1924. The house had been purchased by Strachey in the name of Partridge.

In 1926, Ralph Partridge began an affair with Frances Marshall, and left to live with her in London. His marriage to Carrington was effectively over, but he continued to visit her most weekends. In 1928 Carrington met Bernard ‘Beakus’ Penrose, a friend of Partridge’s and the younger brother of the artist Roland Penrose, and began an affair with him. The affair energized Carrington’s artistic creativity, and she also collaborated with Penrose on the making of three films. However, Penrose wanted Carrington exclusively for himself, a commitment she refused to make because of her love for Strachey. The affair, her last with a man, ended when Carrington became pregnant and had an abortion.

During her lifetime, Carrington’s work received no critical attention. The lack of encouragement may have kept her from displaying her artwork: the two central personal relationships in her life, Lytton Strachey and Ralph Partridge, did not believe it should be exhibited. Carrington’s work can be described as progressive, because it did not fit into the mainstream of art in England at the time. In fact, her work was not considered art at all. Her work featured Victorian style pictures which were made from coloured tin foil and paper. Carrington included pen sketches in letters to her friends, with the intention of entertaining them. She also created wood-block prints, which were highly regarded. Her lesser-known work included painted pub signs and murals, ceramics, fireplaces, and tin trunks.

Carrington was better known for her landscape paintings. These paintings have even been linked to surrealism. Her landscapes blend the facts of visual perception with interior desires and fantasies. One specific work of art, Mountain Ranges from Yegen, Andalusia, 1924, shows the split in perspectives. There is an intimate foreground, and there is in the distance a view of the mountains. The main focus, on the middle mountains, exhibit the texture of human skin. This merges the notion of the personal being made public.

Death

Strachey died of stomach cancer at Ham Spray in January 1932. Carrington, who saw no purpose in a life without Strachey, committed suicide two months after his death by shooting herself with a gun borrowed from her friend, Hon. Bryan Guinness (later 2nd Baron Moyne). Her body was cremated and the ashes buried under the laurels in the garden of Ham Spray House.

Legacy

An accomplished painter of both portraits and landscape, she also worked in applied and decorative arts, painting on any type of surface she had at hand including inn signs, tiles and furniture. She also decorated pottery. Carrington designed the library at Ham Spray. In 1970 David Garnett published a selection of letters and extracts from her diary, since which time critical and popular appreciation of her work has risen sharply. In 1978, Sir John Rothenstein, for nearly 30 years Director of the Tate Gallery, London, called Dora Carrington “the most neglected serious painter of her time.” “That is no longer the case. In 1995 she was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery in London.” Two of her works are in the Tate Gallery London. Carrington’s life with Strachey was dramatized in the 1995 film Carrington, starring Emma Thompson in the title role.

Relationship with Lytton Strachey

For many years, Carrington’s art was neglected by the public and her main notoriety was due to her relationship with Lytton Strachey. On the day she agreed to marry Partridge she wrote to Strachey, who was in Italy, what has been described as “one of the most moving love letters in the English language. She wrote “… I cried last night Lytton, whilst he slept by my side sleeping happily—I cried to think of a savage cynical fate which had made it impossible for my love ever to be used by you …” Strachey wrote back “… you do know very well that I love you as something more than a friend, you angelic creature, whose goodness to me has made me happy for years, and whose presence in my life has been and always will be, one of the most important things in my life …” On his deathbed Strachey said, “I always wanted to marry Carrington and I never did.” His biographer calls this sentiment “not true; but he could not have said anything more deeply consoling”. Upon his death, Strachey left Carrington £10,000 (the equivalent of £240,000 in 1994).

Bloomsbury : Virginia Woolf , Bipolar Feminist Genius With A Room Of Ones Own….

Adeline Virginia Woolf née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), with its famous dictum, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Woolf suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, thought to have been the result of what is now termed bipolar disorder, and committed suicide by drowning in 1941 at the age of 59.

Early life

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen at 22 Hyde Park Gate in London. Her parents were Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) and Julia Prinsep Duckworth Stephen (née Jackson) (1846–1895). Leslie Stephen was a notable historian, author, critic and mountaineer. He was a founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, a work which would influence Woolf’s later experimental biographies. Julia Stephen was a renowned beauty, born in British India to Dr. John and Maria Pattle Jackson. She was also the niece of the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and first cousin of the temperance leader Lady Henry Somerset. Julia moved to England with her mother, where she served as a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones.

Woolf was educated by her parents in their literate and well-connected household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. Her parents had each been married previously and been widowed, and, consequently, the household contained the children of three marriages. Julia had three children by her first husband, Herbert Duckworth: George, Stella, and Gerald Duckworth. Leslie first married Harriet Marian (Minny) Thackeray (1840–1875), the daughter of William Thackeray, and they had one daughter: Laura Makepeace Stephen, who was declared mentally disabled and lived with the family until she was institutionalised in 1891. Leslie and Julia had four children together: Vanessa Stephen (1879), Thoby Stephen (1880), Virginia (1882), and Adrian Stephen (1883).

Sir Leslie Stephen’s eminence as an editor, critic, and biographer, and his connection to William Thackeray, meant that his children were raised in an environment filled with the influences of Victorian literary society. Henry James, George Henry Lewes, and Virginia’s honorary godfather, James Russell Lowell, were among the visitors to the house. Julia Stephen was equally well connected. She came from a family of beauties who left their mark on Victorian society as models for Pre-Raphaelite artists and early photographers, including her aunt Julia Margaret Cameron who was also a visitor to the Stephen household. Supplementing these influences was the immense library at the Stephens’ house, from which Virginia and Vanessa were taught the classics and English literature. Unlike the girls, their brothers Adrian and Julian (Thoby) were formally educated and sent to Cambridge, a difference that Virginia would resent. The sisters did, however, benefit indirectly from their brothers’ Cambridge contacts, as the boys brought their new intellectual friends home to the Stephens’ drawing room.

According to Woolf’s memoirs, her most vivid childhood memories were not of London but of St. Ives in Cornwall, where the family spent every summer until 1895. The Stephens’ summer home, Talland House, looked out over Porthminster Bay, and is still standing today, though somewhat altered. Memories of these family holidays and impressions of the landscape, especially the Godrevy Lighthouse, informed the fiction Woolf wrote in later years, most notably To the Lighthouse.

The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia’s several nervous breakdowns. She was, however, able to take courses of study (some at degree level) in Greek, Latin, German and history at the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London between 1897 and 1901, and this brought her into contact with some of the early reformers of women’s higher education such as Clara Pater, George Warr and Lilian Faithfull (Principal of the King’s Ladies’ Department and noted as one of the Steamboat ladies).Her sister Vanessa also studied Latin, Italian, art and architecture at King’s Ladies’ Department. On 2 May 2013, it was announced that Woolf was to be honoured by her alma mater when, in Autumn 2013, the Virginia Woolf Building of King’s College London would open on Kingsway, London.

The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalised. Modern scholars (including her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell) have suggested her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods were also influenced by the sexual abuse to which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected by their half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth (which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate).

Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by periodic mood swings and associated illnesses. She spent three short periods in 1910, 1912 and 1913 at Burley House, 15 Cambridge Park, Twickenham, described as “a private nursing home for women with nervous disorder”.Though this instability often affected her social life, her literary productivity continued with few breaks throughout her life.

Bloomsbury

After the death of their father and Virginia’s second nervous breakdown, Vanessa and Adrian sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and bought a house at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury.

Woolf came to know Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Rupert Brooke, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, David Garnett, and Roger Fry, who together formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. Several members of the group attained notoriety in 1910 with the Dreadnought hoax, which Virginia participated in disguised as a male Abyssinian royal. Her complete 1940 talk on the Hoax was discovered and is published in the memoirs collected in the expanded edition of The Platform of Time (2008). In 1907 Vanessa married Clive Bell, and the couple’s interest in avant garde art would have an important influence on Woolf’s development as an author.

Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf on 10 August 1912. Despite his low material status (Woolf referring to Leonard during their engagement as a “penniless Jew”) the couple shared a close bond. Indeed, in 1937, Woolf wrote in her diary: “Love-making—after 25 years can’t bear to be separate … you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete.” The two also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published Virginia’s novels along with works by T.S. Eliot, Laurens van der Post, and others. The Press also commissioned works by contemporary artists, including Dora Carrington and Vanessa Bell.

The ethos of the Bloomsbury group encouraged a liberal approach to sexuality, and in 1922 she met the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicolson. After a tentative start, they began a sexual relationship, which, according to Sackville-West in a letter to her husband dated August 17, 1926, was only twice consummated. However Virginia’s intimacy with Vita seems to have continued into the early 1930s. In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero’s life spans three centuries and both sexes. Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West’s son, wrote “The effect of Vita on Virginia is all contained in Orlando, the longest and most charming love letter in literature, in which she explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her”. After their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf’s death in 1941. Virginia Woolf also remained close to her surviving siblings, Adrian and Vanessa; Thoby had died of typhoid fever at the age of 26.

Work

Woolf began writing professionally in 1900, initially for the Times Literary Supplement with a journalistic piece about Haworth, home of the Brontë family. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 by her half-brother’s imprint, Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd. This novel was originally titled Melymbrosia, but Woolf repeatedly changed the draft. An earlier version of The Voyage Out has been reconstructed by Woolf scholar Louise DeSalvo and is now available to the public under the intended title. DeSalvo argues that many of the changes Woolf made in the text were in response to changes in her own life.

Woolf went on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and popular success. Much of her work was self-published through the Hogarth Press. She is seen as a major twentieth century novelist and one of the foremost modernists.

Woolf is considered a major innovator in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters. Woolf’s reputation declined sharply after World War II, but her importance was re-established with the growth of feminist criticism in the 1970s.

Virginia Woolf’s peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—and sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters’ receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions. Woolf has often been credited with stream of consciousness writing alongside her modernist contemporaries like James Joyce and Joseph Conrad.

The intensity of Virginia Woolf’s poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings—often wartime environments—of most of her novels. For example, Mrs Dalloway (1925) centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to organise a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War bearing deep psychological scars.

To the Lighthouse (1927) is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centres on the Ramsay family’s anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation’s inhabitants in the midst of war, and of the people left behind. It also explores the passage of time, and how women are forced by society to allow men to take emotional strength from them.

Orlando (1928) is one of Virginia Woolf’s lightest novels. A parodic biography of a young nobleman who lives for three centuries without ageing much past thirty (but who does abruptly turn into a woman), the book is in part a portrait of Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West. It was meant to console Vita for the loss of her ancestral home, though it is also a satirical treatment of Vita and her work. In Orlando, the techniques of historical biographers are being ridiculed; the character of a pompous biographer is being assumed in order for it to be mocked.

The Waves (1931) presents a group of six friends whose reflections, which are closer to recitatives than to interior monologues proper, create a wave-like atmosphere that is more akin to a prose poem than to a plot-centred novel.

Flush: A Biography (1933) is a part-fiction, part-biography of the cocker spaniel owned by Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The book is written from the dog’s point of view. Woolf was inspired to write this book from the success of the Rudolf Besier play, The Barretts of Wimpole Street. In the play, Flush is on stage for much of the action. The play was produced for the first time in 1932 by actress Katharine Cornell.

Her last work, Between the Acts (1941), sums up and magnifies Woolf’s chief preoccupations: the transformation of life through art, sexual ambivalence, and meditation on the themes of flux of time and life, presented simultaneously as corrosion and rejuvenation—all set in a highly imaginative and symbolic narrative encompassing almost all of English history. This book is the most lyrical of all her works, not only in feeling but in style, being chiefly written in verse. While Woolf’s work can be understood as consistently in dialogue with Bloomsbury, particularly its tendency (informed by G. E. Moore, among others) towards doctrinaire rationalism, it is not a simple recapitulation of the coterie’s ideals.

Woolf’s works have been translated into over 50 languages, by writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Marguerite Yourcenar.

Attitudes toward Judaism, Christianity and fascism

 Woolf was criticised by some as an antisemite, despite her being happily married to a Jewish man. This antisemitism is drawn from the fact that she often wrote of Jewish characters in stereotypical archetypes and generalisations, including describing some of her Jewish characters as physically repulsive and dirty. The overwhelming^[ and rising 1920s and 1930s antisemitism possibly influenced Virginia Woolf. She wrote in her diary: “I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh.” However, in a 1930 letter to the composer Ethel Smyth, quoted in Nigel Nicolson’s biography Virginia Woolf, she recollects her boasts of Leonard’s Jewishness confirming her snobbish tendencies, “How I hated marrying a Jew- What a snob I was, for they have immense vitality.”

In another letter to Smyth, Woolf gives a scathing denunciation of Christianity, seeing it as self-righteous “egotism” and stating “my Jew has more religion in one toe nail—more human love, in one hair.”

Woolf and her husband Leonard hated and feared 1930s fascism with its antisemitism even before knowing they were on Hitler’s blacklist. Her 1938 book Three Guineas was an indictment of fascism.

Death

After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel, Between the Acts, Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work. On 28 March 1941, Woolf put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, walked into the River Ouse near her home, and drowned herself. Woolf’s body was not found until 18 April 1941. Her husband buried her cremated remains under an elm in the garden of Monk’s House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.

In her last note to her husband she wrote:

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.

Modern scholarship and interpretations

Though at least one biography of Virginia Woolf appeared in her lifetime, the first authoritative study of her life was published in 1972 by her nephew Quentin Bell.

Hermione Lee’s 1996 biography Virginia Woolf provides a thorough and authoritative examination of Woolf’s life and work.

In 2001 Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska edited The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Julia Briggs’s Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, published in 2005, is the most recent examination of Woolf’s life. It focuses on Woolf’s writing, including her novels and her commentary on the creative process, to illuminate her life. Thomas Szasz’s book My Madness Saved Me: The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf ) was published in 2006.

Feminism

Recently, studies of Virginia Woolf have focused on feminist and lesbian themes in her work, such as in the 1997 collection of critical essays, Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer.

Woolf’s best-known nonfiction works, A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), examine the difficulties that female writers and intellectuals face because men hold disproportionate legal and economic power and the future of women in education and society. In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir counts, of all women who ever lived, only three female writers—Emily Brontë, Woolf and “sometimes” Katherine Mansfield—who have explored “the given.”

Mental illness

Much scholarship has been made of Woolf’s mental illness, described as a “manic-depressive illness” in Thomas Caramagno’s 1992 book, The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness, in which he also warns against the “neurotic-genius” way of looking at mental illness, where people rationalise that creativity is somehow born of mental illness. In two books by Stephen Trombley, Woolf is described as having a confrontational relationship with her doctors, and possibly being a woman who is a “victim of male medicine”, referring to the contemporary relative lack of understanding about mental illness.

Irene Coates’s book Who’s Afraid of Leonard Woolf: A Case for the Sanity of Virginia Woolf holds that Leonard Woolf’s treatment of his wife encouraged her ill health and ultimately was responsible for her death. Though extensively researched, this view is not accepted by Leonard’s family. Victoria Glendinning’s book Leonard Woolf: A Biography argues that Leonard Woolf was not only supportive of his wife but enabled her to live as long as she did by providing her with the life and atmosphere she needed to live and write. Virginia’s own diaries support this view of the Woolfs’ marriage.

Controversially, Louise A. DeSalvo reads most of Woolf’s life and career through the lens of the incestuous sexual abuse Woolf suffered as a young woman in her 1989 book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work.

Woolf’s fiction is also studied for its insight into shell shock, war, class and modern British society.

People : Christopher Lloyd, Great Dixter’s Founder and Gardening Impressario……

Christopher Hamilton Lloyd, OBE (2 March 1921 – 27 January 2006) was a British gardener and author. He was the 20th Century chronicler for the heavily planted, labour-intensive, country garden.

Life

Lloyd was born in Great Dixter, into an upper-middle-class family, the youngest of six children. In 1910, his father, Nathaniel Lloyd (an Arts and Crafts designer of posters and other images for confectionery companies), purchased Great Dixter, a manor house in Northiam, East Sussex near the south coast of England. Edwin Lutyens was hired to renovate and extend the gardens attached to the house. Nathaniel Lloyd loved gardens, designed some of the garden himself, and imparted that love to his son. Lloyd learned the skills required of a gardener from his mother Daisy, who did the actual gardening and who introduced him to Gertrude Jekyll.

After Rugby School, he attended King’s College, Cambridge, where he read modern languages before entering the Army during World War II. After the war he received his bachelors in Decorative Horticulture (Designing and Planning) from Wye College, University of London, in 1949. He stayed on there as an assistant lecturer in Horticulture until 1954.

In 1954, Lloyd moved home to Great Dixter and set up a nursery, specialising in unusual plants. He regularly opened the house and gardens to the public.

In 1979 Lloyd received the Victoria Medal of Honour, the highest award of the Royal Horticultural Society, for his promotion of gardening and his extensive work on their Floral Committee. Lloyd was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Open University in 1996 and was appointed as an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2000.

Philosophy

Lloyd was firmly rooted in the Arts and Crafts style of garden. In most ways he was, like his mother and Gertrude Jekyll, a practical gardener. He said “I couldn’t design a garden. I just go along and carp.” Despite his extensive work with flowers, he had an appreciation for the garden as a whole. He also understood human nature. One professional gardener likes to quote Lloyd from his book Foliage Plants where he says: “For it is an indisputable fact that appreciation of foliage comes at a later stage in our education, if it comes at all”.

Oeuvre

Lloyd rapidly felt the need to share his gardening discoveries and published The Mixed Border in 1957, which was followed by Clematis in 1965 and The Well-Tempered Garden in 1970. Lloyd had begun a book on the use of exotic plants in British gardens when he died, his gardening friends and colleagues completed the book, Exotic Planting for Adventurous Gardeners, in 2007.

Great Dixter his house in Northiam, East Sussex, England. Was built in 1910–12 by architect Edwin Lutyens, who combined an existing mid-15th century house on the site with a similar structure brought from Benenden, Kent, together with his own additions. It is a Grade I listed building. The garden, widely known for its continuous tradition of sophisticated plantsmanship, is Grade I listed in the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.

House

The original Northiam house, known as Dixter, dating from the mid-15th century, was acquired by a businessman named Nathaniel Lloyd in 1909. He had a 16th-century house in a similar style moved from Kent and the two were combined with new work by Lutyens to create a much larger house, which was rechristened Great Dixter. It is a romantic recreation of a medieval manor house, complete with great hall, parlour, solar and yeoman’s hall.

Garden

Lloyd and Lutyens began the garden at Great Dixter, but it was Lloyd’s son Christopher Lloyd, a well known garden writer and television personality, who made it famous. The garden is in the arts and crafts style, and features topiary, a long border, an orchard and a wild flower meadow. The planting is profuse, yet structured, and has featured many bold experiments of form, colour and combination. The garden is currently managed by Fergus Garrett, who worked closely with Lloyd up until his death in 2006 as Head Gardener and introduced a number of innovations into the planting scheme.

In the grounds of Great Dixter are three 18th-century oast houses, under a common roof, and a 15th-century barn. These are Grade II* listed.