‘She can always paint more pictures'

The vigorous creativity of Vanessa Bell and her lover Duncan Grant’s work owes much to the countryside surrounding their farmhouse in the Sussex Downs, says Matthew Dennison

- Matthew Dennison

THE winter of 1940 was unusually cold. In the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, A. J. Drummond noted that such conditions had not been experienced for 50 years. As much as she could, artist Vanessa Bell worked indoors on a painting of the barn at Charleston, the farmhouse in East Sussex she had shared with her friend and lover Duncan Grant since 1916. The uncompromising chill of this stark, apparently simple image, included in ‘Charleston: The Bloomsbury Muse’ at Philip Mould Gallery, is unusual among landscape paintings by Bell and Grant.

At Charleston that winter, Bell worked in her new attic studio. Deliberately, she cut herself off from others in the colourfully decorated house that, for more than two decades, had served as the gathering point for the artists, writers and thinkers known collectively as the Bloomsbury Group. The wintry view appealed to her state of mind.

Months earlier, her London studio at 8, Fitzroy Street had been destroyed by an incendiary bomb. Grant noted a phlegmatic quality to her response to catastrophe then. She ‘takes it very philosophically,’ he wrote, ‘and says she can always paint more pictures’. And so she did, including this painting so at odds with any of Grant’s images of Charleston’s barns, among them a picture of the threshing barn painted two years later that, despite its winter setting, glows with gashes of bold yellow sunshine like the glittering light of Old Master Nativity scenes.