A newly discovered portrait of Vanessa Bell by Duncan Grant, believed to be the final depiction of her before her death, has been donated to Charleston, the museum based at their former home near Lewes, per observer.co.uk.
The pen and biro drawing shows Bell, sister of Virginia Woolf, as she lay dying from bronchitis in 1961.
The drawing was given by an anonymous donor and was found during preparations for a new exhibition about the couple at Tate Britain. Bell was 81 when she died on April 7, 1961, and Grant dated the portrait to the following week. He lived for another 17 years without the woman his biographer, Frances Spalding, called his “life partner”.
Dr Sophie Pickford, a specialist in the Bloomsbury group at Cambridge University, described the portrait as “extraordinarily moving” and said it captured a “last moment of physical connection” between the couple.
Grant and Bell were artists who worked side by side, sometimes on the same canvas. Bell was married to the art critic Clive Bell, while Grant was in a relationship with the economist John Maynard Keynes. According to Christopher Jones, a researcher at UCL working on the Bloomsbury group, this only strengthened their bond. “Duncan’s queerness meant his relationship with Vanessa was always something else. But they were the most stable people in each other’s lives,” he said.
In 1918, Grant and Bell had a child together, Angelica Garnett, whose paternity was hidden from her until she turned 18. In her memoir, she wrote that learning Grant was her real father left her “unable to contain the feeling that, with such a father, I had been marked for a special destiny”.
Grant painted Bell throughout her life, but the newly unearthed portrait is “the coda in the 50 years of portraiture that he did of her,” said Darren Clarke, head of collections at Charleston. “It has the power of those moments when you’re waiting to say goodbye,” he said. It was previously thought that a charcoal drawing from earlier in 1961 was the final portrait of Bell.
Interest in Grant and Bell is growing. From November 12, many of their works will go on display at Tate Britain for the exhibition” Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury,” and the pair are currently main characters in the new James Graham play The Standard of Living. Pickford said their popularity was no surprise. “There’s something about the spontaneity of the way they created their art, and created their own worlds around them, that is enticing to people,” she said.
Grant and Bell were central figures of the Bloomsbury group, a circle of writers, artists and intellectuals that included Woolf and Keynes. Charleston, their former home, is now a museum dedicated to their work and legacy.
•Featured image: The artist Duncan Grant, member of the Bloomsbury group, in front of a textile art work in the 1950s/observer.co.uk