An extract from Tony Bradshaw's introduction to "A Bloomsbury Canvas"

At its simplest, the Bloomsbury Group was the circle round Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. When the Victorian man of letters Sir Leslie Stephen died in 1904, his daughters, Virginia and Vanessa, being determined to put their constrained middle-class girlhoods behind them, set up house at 46 Gordon Square in the then-shabby district of Bloomsbury with their two brothers, Thoby and Adrian. Thoby brought home his Cambridge friends Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey and Saxon Sydney-Turner, inviting them for social evenings with his sisters, the scene being set of earnest youths sitting around the room sipping cocoa and whisky and discussing intently such matters as the ‘meaning of truth’. Most of these young men had been elected to the Apostles, a secret society of intellectually notable undergraduates from Trinity and King’s Colleges. Through the link with the Apostles the Group widened to include E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, Desmond MacCarthy and John Maynard Keynes who had left Cambridge earlier. The Group also included Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey’s cousin.

Apart from Saxon Sydney-Turner, who remained an obscure Treasury official, all of the Bloomsbury Group made a very significant contribution to British intellectual and artistic life in the first part of the twentieth century. The two giants, famed internationally, are Virginia Woolf, who broke new ground with her ‘stream of consciousness’ writing; and the economist, Maynard Keynes, whose revolutionary economic theories and significant efforts to build new economic orders after the traumas of two world wars remain an abiding legacy.

However there is no denying that in the last thirty years, since the seemingly endless flow of biographies, memoirs, published letters and diaries began, the Bloomsberries have been chiefly famous for their less than conventional personal relationships. By today’s standards they may not have had a dazzling number of encounters - Frances Partridge has claimed that there was more love and less sex than people tend to assume - but the homosexuality or bisexuality or generous open-mindedness of many members of the Group permitted a fascinating web of affairs and liaisons. These ranged from the devoted partnership of Lydia Lopokova and Maynard Keynes (who had once been almost exclusively homosexual), to the open marriage at Charleston of Clive and Vanessa Bell, to the ménage at Ham Spray where Lytton Strachey loved Ralph Partridge, who married Dora Carrington, who loved only Lytton (and who took her life after his death to prove it). With Virginia Woolf committing suicide herself, the early deaths of Thoby Stephen through typhoid and of Vanessa’s son Julian, killed in the Spanish Civil War, the Bloomsbury story is laced with serious drama as well as less consequential intrigues.

The fascination with the Group’s lives, their work and their art has grown exponentially over the past thirty years, and The Bloomsbury Workshop, providing a focal point for the books and pictures, has significantly contributed to this increasing awareness. To complement and add interest to the varied round of exhibitions, a number of people have written short essays, a selection of which have been brought together in this book. Including the leading scholars and art historians in the field, the writers of these essays have all been intimately involved as commentators on Bloomsbury over the past quarter century. Among their number, Angelica Garnett, Quentin Bell and Frances Partridge speak from first-hand experience, as they themselves were directly involved through family ties or close association from the 1920s onwards, while both Nigel Nicolson and Anne Olivier Bell knew well a number of the main participants. Collectively these writers bring unique insights and perspectives to new corners of the Bloomsbury canvas.

The most endearing aspect of these brief essays and memoirs is that they have the air of confidences. Often far from scholarly, sometimes sketchy and always relaxed, they presume a certain level of familiarity with the Bloomsbury legend. None of the writers troubles, for example, to explain who Virginia and Vanessa’s parents were or that Charleston is set among the fields of Sussex. They refer to Duncan or Lytton or Roger with the easy assumption that everyone knows the natures of these people and exactly where they fit into the story; Leonard and Clive and the others are treated, in the same way as the readers regard them, as friends or people with whom they are closely associated. That easy familiarity, almost a continuation of the original Group’s relationship, is part of the mix of current-day fascination with Bloomsbury.

Another attractive aspect of these pieces is that the writers totally abandon the embattled stance and aggrieved tone that defenders of Bloomsbury can sometimes adopt. The authors know that they are among friends and yet, as if they had been asked a stimulating question over lunch or tea, they use the occasion of each essay to provide a short focal point for reminiscences, allowing for specificity and vividness of detail. Although Angelica Garnett has described her friend and second cousin Janie Bussy in her memoir, Deceived With Kindness, she takes the opportunity of an exhibition essay to recall Janie with greater precision, seen in memory sitting on a deckchair on the lawn at Charleston: ‘Her back is cradled by the canvas of the chair, while her long elegant legs in high-heeled sandals are crossed in an unconscious gesture of self-protection and a book half falls from narrow fastidious hands. In a gauche way she was, I think, sexy, but her sensuality, detectable in the droop of her scarlet lips, remained unsatisfied.’ Elsewhere Julian Bell, writing on the occasion of a small memorial exhibition of Quentin Bell’s work, evocatively recalls his childhood memories of his father’s absences in the adjoining pottery: ‘In that other room he would be moulding or scraping or painting the clay, sucking at a pipe that had usually gone out, listening to Radio Three; happy, you felt. You knew that that quiet, steady, pleasurable activity was at the centre of him; and now it’s what isn’t there.’

Threaded through the essays are reproductions of paintings and drawings, all of which have passed through the hands of The Bloomsbury Workshop at some stage; selection of these has been narrowed further by the decision to exclude images published previously in any other book. While adoption of this criterion has resulted in the omission of such notable paintings as Vanessa Bell’s E.M. Forster and Mrs Grant, both now in the USA, and Carrington’s Annie Stiles and Beeny Dogs, purchased respectively by an Australian collector and the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the positive outcome is that a number of important and delightful images are for the first time being unveiled to a wider audience.

These pictures illustrate much of what is best and typical in Bloomsbury art. They range widely and include portraits of the artists’ friends and relations; reinterpretation of noted European iconography; scenes around Charleston and from the artists’ travels abroad; creations of sheer fantasy; self-appraisal, to be seen in Vanessa Bell’s introspective Self Portrait; caricature as witnessed in her Paris café drawings; some cheerful, uplifting decoration; and an absorption (particularly by Vanessa) with flowers and vases in still-life compositions. Mixed with a dash of the exotic (Bacchus) and a glimpse of the erotic (Grant’s supple male nudes), these images represent the very essence of Bloomsbury art that their devotees find so alluring.

What these pictures share with the essays is a sense of charm, intimacy and inspiration. And as long as people enjoy the exploration of new corners and get warm pleasure from the old stories retold, then there is no doubt that Bloomsbury enthusiasts from Southampton to San Francisco will be joined by new adherents from Rio to Reykjavik. That, after all, is what A Bloomsbury Canvas is about.