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Flowers in memoriam to Elisa Kay Sparks

Posted in in memoriam, tagged , , , , on Sunday 17 August 2025| 2 Comments »

Editor’s Note: Additional recollections of Elisa Sparks’ contributions to the Woolf community and beyond were added to this post on 22 August, 2025.

I could never think of Virginia Woolf and flowers without thinking of Elisa Kay Sparks, who died Aug. 16 in Seattle, Washington.

Woolf, flowers and gardens were Elisa’s specialty, and she shared her passion and her knowledge with Woolf readers and scholars around the world — through her published writing, at conferences, through her many personal relationships, and via her social media accounts.

Elisa’s online “A Virginia Woolf Herbarium”

She created the online resource, A Virginia Woolf Herbarium, which was featured on Blogging Woolf and recognized by author Rebecca Solnit.

Scholar, teacher, writer, artist

A teacher of literature (contemporary, modern British, and science fiction) and women’s studies for 35 years at Clemson University, Elisa published articles on parks, gardens, and flowers in Virginia Woolf’s life and work as well as a number of pieces exploring connections between the works of Woolf and the American Modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe.

She was under contract to write an inclusive study of Woolf’s use of flowers in her novels, and she had finished its 300 pages before she died.

She was also working on a series of woodcuts of the 98 flowers that appear in Woolf’s novels, a project she planned to present at the 36th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf in Oslo, Norway, in 2027.

The woodcut project is no surprise. For besides being a scholar and a writer, Elisa was also a printmaker, specializing in color-reduction woodblocks and encaustic monotype, as well as experimenting with other forms of art.

Tributes to Elisa from around the globe

A memorial service for Elisa is being planned. Meanwhile, tributes to Elisa were posted to the VWoolf Listserv and on her Facebook page and others. Please post yours as a comment below.

“She was, in the words of Shilo McGiff, `a wild and beautiful soul’ and she loved and cared for so many of us in the Woolf community for many, many years,” according to Anne Fernald in her post that shared the news of Elisa’s passing with the VWoolf Listserv.

Elisa Bolchi’s wall of artwork that includes a piece by Elisa Kay Sparks.

From Elisa Bolchi, co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Transnational Perspectives: “An artist never dies. In my house in Ferrara, @ekaysparks is on the wall behind my sofa, with a work titled ‘Talland House Ghosts’ that I bought at the Annual Woolf Conference at Fort Meyers, Florida. It’s colourful, poetical, inspiring, like she was. You’ll be missed, Elisa. But you’ll live with us, and make our memories colourful and bright. Because an artist never dies.”

From Helen Southworth: “She was funny, kind, engaged, and very creative.  I never visited her Woolf World, but it captures nicely her adventurousness. I’m imagining her laughing and bustling about, cooking up a new project on her Woolf island surrounded by O’Keefe-inspired flowers!”

From Louisa Albani, artist and the publisher of Nightbird Press: “Elisa was a real supporter of my Virginia Woolf artworks and one of the artworks she purchased was of Virginia Woolf describing her mother standing by the purple passion flowers that grew on the balcony of Talland.”

Facebook post by Mine Özyurt Kılıç

From Mine Özyurt Kılıç of the Woolf Arts Archive: “Your earthly herbarium of human and non-human beings will miss you so much, dear Elisa Kay Sparks.”

From neighbor Annika Bowden: “Rest in peace, Elisa. Thank you so much for your friendship, kindness, and infectious positive attitude. Our little neighborhood is not the same without you and you are desperately missed by many of us.”

From Angeliki Spiropoulou: “Elisa was a prominent member of the Woolf community who has contributed original, insightful and sensitive work to Woolf studies, a kind, sparkling  and inspiring academic, artist and friend. She will be missed by all who knew her.”

Elisa’s beloved dog

From Laura Cernat: “Elisa will be dearly missed. I wasn’t able to meet her in person either, but at the Woolf Salons she was a vibrant presence and an indispensable source of insights (and complete bibliographies on a variety of topics). I am glad that I got to know her, at least virtually, and that the Woolf Herbarium blog lives on as part of her legacy. So sad to hear about her passing.”

From Katherine Hill-Miller: “Like all of us, I am so sorry to hear of Elisa’s death. She was a bright light in the Woolf world, a woman who unfailingly welcomed, engaged, and supported others. It goes without saying that Elisa’s work on flowers and plants is an invaluable tool for all of us. But Elisa was, quite simply, a wonderfully loving woman.  I miss her deeply.  A light has gone out.”

From Diana Swanson: “Elisa’s Woolf scholarship is important, original, interesting, and often fun. I honor her for that. And I honor her for her art and her support of other artists. I honor her more, though, for something she may not have mentioned to many on the Woolf listserv. Some years ago, I shared with Elisa and a few others at a Woolf conference that I was searching out ways of supporting a girls boarding high school that I had visited in rural Kenya, a school founded by two Kenyan friends of mine to provide ‘an education good enough for the richest, open to the poorest.’ Sometime after that, Elisa came to me with an idea. In memory of her parents, both scientists, she offered to support the teaching of science at Jane Adeny Memorial School (JAMS). The result became ‘Sparks Lab,’ a science building in which, as of today, more than 350 Kenyan girls have studied biology, chemistry, and physics. Thanks to Elisa’s gift, many JAMS alums are now either studying for, or currently pursuing, careers in agriculture, medicine, and the sciences. One young woman is even now studying at the university in Illinois where I used to teach, researching crop plant diseases with the goal of helping to reduce the kind of hunger she herself experienced growing up. Elisa touched my heart, and transformed lives, with her care and compassion for people she never met but whose lives she could imagine and value.

From Anne Fernald: “She was ill with cancer, but, although her death came quickly, she was surrounded by friends and knew how much the many of us who could not be present with her in Seattle loved her. Before she died, she shared an incredibly cheerful and brave message about her dog, the flowers, the birds, and how she was letting herself be taken care of in her illness. I know that many of you will join me in grieving and celebrating the life of this wonderful woman.”

A blessing cast

Below is Elisa’s July 3 post on Facebook. And yes, she did cast a blessing to all who knew her.

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Many Paths of Crossing: Panels at Woolf Conference #33

Posted in 33rd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, global series, Orlando, tagged , , , , on Thursday 15 May 2025| Leave a Comment »

Editor’s Note: As an introduction to the upcoming 34th  Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: “Woolf and Dissidence,” set for July 4-8 at King’s College London and the University of Sussex, England, we offer the third in a series of four posts in which Leanne Oden and Serena Wong reflect on their encounters with Virginia Woolf and with Woolf scholars — dubbed Woolfians — that they met at the 33rd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Woolf, Modernity, Technology, held June 6-9, 2024, at Fresno State University.

“Communication is health; communication is truth; communication is happiness. ”—Virginia Woolf, “Montaigne”, The Common Reader (1925)

The 2024 Woolf conference hosted a total of 29 panels across its four-day program. These panels, all brilliant, demonstrate in various methods a review of Woolf studies under the theme of technological innovation.

The two panels discussed in this post were respectively attended by the authors who also presented in them. Leanne reports on the panel “Offline Anxieties, Online Woolf’,” which is interested in the contextualizing and de-contextualizing of Woolf on public platforms in processes of reading.

Serena writes on the panel “An Examination of Craft, Technê & Aestheticism,” which engages with the relationship between crafting and reading in aesthetic approaches to Woolf’s work. Both accounts find solace – and new ideas – in their own clusters of research.

Panels

“Offline Anxieties, Online Woolf”

By Leanne Oden, Ph.D. Student, University of Rhode Island

L-R: panelists of “Offline Anxieties, Online Woolf” include Adriana Varga, Lisa Tyler, Judith Allen, Leanne Oden, and panel chair, Anne MacMaster. Photo courtesy of Amanda Golden.

The panel that I was selected to present in, alongside Lisa Tyler (Sinclair Community College), Judith Allen (Kelly Writers House), and Adriana Varga (Nevada State University), moderated by our panel chair, Anne MacMaster (Millsaps College), engaged with Woolf by rethinking the ways in which we contextualize and decontextualize her work.

From memes to politics

Lisa Tyler’s presentation, “‘Very Beautiful and Very Frightening:’ Interpreting Virginia Woolf-Related Memes,” investigates the circulation of Virginia Woolf’s images and quotations from her public and private writings on social media. She defines memes in her research as “cultural units—ideas, tunes, catchphrases, or images—that arise and propagate themselves through imitation.”

In her presentation, “Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, and ‘the Manufacture of Consent,’” Judith Allen examines the political insights of Virginia Woolf alongside that of Walter Lippmann, who coined the term “manufacturing consent” in 1922.

Allen’s research leads her to question agents of power and their relationship to censorship, urging the audience to consider “which person, corporation, or government official controls the narrative — or at times, ‘purchases’ the narrative — and what might happen if we take risks, opposing the ‘official story’, the acceptable opinion.” In her concluding thoughts, Allen left the audience with a quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “And so, difficult as it may be: ‘We must speak out!’ In Martin Luther King’s words: ‘Silence is betrayal.’”

Culture, audience and responses to AROO

The presentation that I gave centers on the dynamic relationship between culture and audience as explored in Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts (1941), as a shared experience between the characters within and the readers outside of the text. In this research, I examine the culture-audience relationship as a striking historically specific example of human-agent interaction (HAI), particularly through the literary representations of artifacts like the paintings and the newspaper.

My paper investigates the ways in which Woolf models a kind of cultural engagement that reflects new subjective modalities made possible through technology and modernity. Many thanks to Alice Wood, as well as my mentor and dear friend, Stephen Barber, for their brilliant research which has so inspired me and pushed my thinking.

Our final panelist, Adriana Varga, delivered her presentation, “‘A Room of One’s Own:’ Reevaluations,” in which she examines several 20th and 21st century responses to Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own, in order to understand how different authors have interpreted and responded to it and why it continues to be a source of inspiration.

The Q&A session asked our panel of presenters to consider “where does Woolf go when decontextualized?” This sophisticated question inspired us to think across all of our presentations and the ways in which we contextualize and decontextualize her life and works.

A heartfelt thank you to my fellow panelists for their insightful research. Additional thanks to the University of Rhode Island Center for the Humanities and the International Virginia Woolf Society’s Suzanne Bellamy travel fund for their contributions to my trip to Fresno, making it possible for me to present my research. It has been a great honor to be among Woolfians and to see Woolf through their eyes.

“An Examination of Craft, Technê & Aestheticism”

By Serena Wong, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Glasgow

I presented on the third day of the conference with fellow panelists Brenna Barks (Fresno State University) and Melissa Johnson (Illinois State University), in a panel with the theme of the interlocking connections between reading, aesthetics, and craft.

Clothing, Orlando, and the intersections of craft and art

L-R: Panelists of “An Examination of Craft, Technê & Aestheticism” include Melissa Johnson, Brenna Barks, Serena Wong, and panel Chair, Marcia James. Photo courtesy of Jane Goldman.

Barks’ paper explored how clothing is used in Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando, and its film and play adaptions in 1992 and 2022/23 respectively.

As a fashion and art historian and material culturist, Barks is eager to define and simultaneously question gender, history, and the self in her study of these renditions regarding the making and theorizing of costumes.

Johnson, who hosted the aforementioned craft workshop, is a professor of Art History & Visual Culture at Illinois State University.

With a research focus on the histories of craft and its intersections with modern and contemporary art, Johnson examined the resonances of text and textile between Woolf’s writing and the work of artist Ann Hamilton.

In a panel that foregrounds the value of creative practice to interpretations of literature, I gladly noticed that the scholars’ discussions, as did my own, emphasized sensory experiences as a crucial tool of artistic exploration. Moreover, from our individual presentations rose an implied agreement that crafting is a political act.

Pottery as resistance

My paper, entitled “Strange Stories on a Willow Pattern Plate: Virginia Woolf, P’ou Song-Lin, and the Chinaware of Bloomsbury,” puts forward the aesthetic and orientalist tensions in Woolf’s 1913 review of Pu Songling’s short story collection Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisure.

My creative practice with pottery painting had led me to create with artist friend Joanne Ning a chinoiserie-style plate, which found its inspiration in the depictions of this review. The plate not only serves as a visualization of the review but is more importantly offered as a project of resistance against the orientalist narratives that surround its form.

I extend my thanks to Barks and Johnson for brilliant conversions on our panel papers, and to the audience who during the Q&A impressed on my mind the blurred boundaries between aesthetic seduction and sedation.

Read past posts in this four-part series

  1. Many Paths of Crossing: Newcomers share their Woolf encounters at conference #33
  2. Many Paths of Crossing: Workshops at Woolf Conference #33

About the authors

Leanne Oden

Leanne Oden is a first-year Ph.D. student and an Instructor of Record in the English Department at the University of Rhode Island. In her forthcoming research, Leanne is interested in questioning the closure narrative of the illness versus health binary as challenged through Woolf’s writing among other modernists. In her role as an educator for the University of Rhode Island, she regularly teaches ENG 110: Introduction to Literature and WRT 106: Introduction to Research Writing.

Serena Wong

Serena Wong is a Ph.D. Candidate in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her doctoral study situates itself at the crossroads of British modernisms and Chinese modernity, with a focus on the orientalism in Virginia Woolf’s stylistic and formal representations of China. Her research also looks at theoretical and creative studies of ornamentation, which she positions as an important dimension of orientalist thought.

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Many Paths of Crossing: Workshops at Woolf Conference #33

Posted in 33rd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury, global series, tagged , , , , , , , on Tuesday 13 May 2025| Leave a Comment »

Editor’s Note: As an introduction to the upcoming 34th  Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Virginia Woolf and Dissidence, set for July 4-8 at King’s College London and the University of Sussex, England, we offer the second in a series of four posts in which Leanne Oden and Serena Wong reflect on their encounters with Virginia Woolf and with Woolf scholars — dubbed Woolfians — that they met at the 33rd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Woolf, Modernity, Technology, held June 6-9 at Fresno State University.

Interactive Workshops

The whole world is a work of art – Virginia Woolf, “Moments of Being”

The interactive workshops at the 2024 Woolf conference provided a hands-on experience at the intersection of theory and practice. Conference attendees were invited to engage with Woolf’s thinking and writing in an exchange of ideas involving tactile, visual, and virtual modalities.

The two workshops highlighted in this post include the following:

  • Interactive Workshop A: “A Million Hands Stitch,” a craft workshop enjoining the act of reading and the practice of stitching, and
  • Interactive Workshop B: “Navigating Modernism(s) Xtended,” an exhibit of graduate work in the interest of creating virtual rooms overseen by J. Ashley Foster at Fresno State University.

Conference attendee Laura Ludtke reflected on her participation in “A Million Hands Stitch” as an active practice that she incorporated into subsequent events during the conference:

Stitching as I listened to other Woolfians share their research and work made me more attentive and attuned to the intricacies and implications of their observations. I’m grateful to have attended a conference where creative and critical practices are so purposefully imbricated.

Interactive Workshop A: “A Million Hands Stitch”

By Serena Wong, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Glasgow

“A Million Hands Stitch” was a craft workshop organized by Melissa Johnson that connected literary reading with creative practice. The workshop, as laid out in the conference booklet, promotes experimentation “with various kinds of making centered in text and textile.”

Melissa Johnson’s thread box at the “A Million Hands Stitch” workshop. Photo courtesy of Cody Vela.

An assortment of tools were offered at the workshop to approach this experiment, including felt, paper, needles, embroidery floss, scissors, a typewriter, and notably stacks of excerpted phrases and passages from Woolf’s writing.

Woolf’s words inspire

I attended the workshop with an interest in expanding the scope and thinking of my own creative practice. I had recently begun to work with pottery and ceramics to process through art Woolf’s discussions of the East, and within the exercises of this project I have come to recognize the benefits of exploring theories in creative practice via additional modes of craft.

Participants of Melissa Johnson’s “A Million Hands Stitch” workshop busy at work. Photo courtesy of Cody Vela.

Taking Johnson’s cue to create from our specific approaches to Woolf, I decided to work with a phrase that caught my eye among the stacks of prompt cards: “white plates in a sunny room.”

The phrase is found from a monologue by Susan in the third section of The Waves. “Now I am hungry. I will call my setter. I think of crusts and bread and butter and white plates in a sunny room.”

In contemplation with my conference paper about Woolf’s discourse on the chinoiserie plate, I took the liberty to suspect, in the context of the British empire’s taste for the willow pattern aesthetic, that the plates in question could be of such design.

After all, Susan’s monologue follows another visualization from Bernard about patterned plates with “Oriental long-tailed birds.” In the empire on which the sun “never” sets, crusts and bread and butter and chinoiserie plates are aligned for consumption in its sunny rooms – though the novel repeatedly gestures to a smashing of china from afar.

Serena’s finished piece from the “A Million Hands Stitch” workshop. Photo by Serena Wong.

Text and thread combine

I completed my workshop piece by typing the phrase on paper and adding to it an embroidered design with needle and thread.

There is something especially beautiful about stitching on paper. In working with so delicate a medium, the practice registers an attempt to make solid what is elusive, as with capturing words on a typewriter or framing sensations in art.

My piece thus results from a merging of my interpretations in reading, pottery painting, and stitching. A huge thank you to Johnson for hosting the wonderful craft workshop, which produced a token for me that I now have framed on my desk as a remembrance of the 2024 Woolf conference.

Interactive Workshop B: “Navigating Modernism(s) Xtended”

By Leanne Oden, Ph.D. Student, University of Rhode Island

Leanne Oden (center) with Callie Weiler of Fresno State University (right) discuss Weiler’s group project, which created an interactive virtual room in the form of a garden  that interprets the works and lives of the Bloomsbury artists. Photo courtesy of Cody Vela.

I attended Interactive Workshop B: “Navigating Modernism(s) Xtended” where I had a lovely conversation with Callie Weiler about the project that she, Joseph LeForge, and Elizabeth Cardenas created as part of a graduate course with J. Ashley Foster.

Titled “The Cultivation of Love and Identity,” it created a virtual room in the form of a garden that interprets the works and lives of the Bloomsbury artists.

Reimagining Bloomsbury as a virtual garden space

Callie shared the vision for this project as outlined in the group’s abstract: “Bloomsbury’s life and love are difficult to describe in concrete terms, and it is this difficulty that necessitates a ludic reimagining of the space they created for themselves and others.

“They transcend barriers and labels to congregate as a group of individuals decisively to explore their meaning of love in its ephemeral, ungraspable form: love is a stimulating exchange, expressed with and through art, and was undefined by sexual orientation, the number, or the gender of partners engaged in romantic discourse.”

Callie walked me through the creative process step by step, starting from the readings that were assigned, choosing partners to collaborate with, identifying a topic, mocking up a storyboard, building a website, and designing the virtual room using Unreal Engine, culminating in a final paper composed by the group.

Creating the garden

The garden they created is fully interactive, allowing users to choose a path in the garden leading to a different artist. Each artist’s path is marked by an associated color.

She shared with me that the idea is to represent each color of the rainbow to emphasize the fluidity of sexuality and gender expression embraced by this group of modernist artists. Users were welcome to add to the garden, making this a truly communal, multimodal project.

Read past posts in this series

  1. Many Paths of Crossing: Newcomers share their Woolf encounters at conference #33

About the authors

Leanne Oden

Leanne Oden is a first-year Ph.D. student and an Instructor of Record in the English Department at the University of Rhode Island. In her forthcoming research, Leanne is interested in questioning the closure narrative of the illness versus health binary as challenged through Woolf’s writing among other modernists. In her role as an educator for the University of Rhode Island, she regularly teaches ENG 110: Introduction to Literature and WRT 106: Introduction to Research Writing.

Serena Wong

Serena Wong is a Ph.D. Candidate in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her doctoral study situates itself at the crossroads of British modernisms and Chinese modernity, with a focus on the orientalism in Virginia Woolf’s stylistic and formal representations of China. Her research also looks at theoretical and creative studies of ornamentation, which she positions as an important dimension of orientalist thought.

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Walking through Woolf’s words in “Kew Gardens”

Posted in 33rd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, art, art exhibits, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , , , on Sunday 16 June 2024| 1 Comment »

I took a walk through Virginia Woolf’s words last week. I moved slowly, quietly. I felt reverent at the silence and the sight of her poetry flowing from the rafters in the light-filled Ellipse Gallery in the tower of the Fresno State Library.

Ane Thon Knutsen watches as conference goers walk through her “Kew Gardens” installation.

I was there early in the morning on Saturday, June 8, to experience Ane Thon Knutsen’s breathtaking installation of “Kew Gardens” at the 33rd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, June 5-9 at Fresno State University.

I was among dozens of other conference participants, each of us lost in our own experience of the unique art installation, each of us feeling lucky to be there, as our view of the installation almost did not happen.

Catastrophe averted

The day before the conference began, the library’s air conditioning stopped working properly — and Fresno was in the middle of a heat wave. That meant that our visit to the installation had to be rescheduled and reformatted.

Our viewing of Ane’s brilliant art installation transformed itself from an elaborate evening arts event with refreshments, poetry, and two keynote talks to a one-hour early morning walk-through in awesome silence.

Kudos to conference organizer J. Ashley Foster for being able to turn on a dime with humor and grace. And kudos to everyone on campus — from librarian Melissa to academic deans and library and student center staff — who made the change possible.

Angling for a view

As I walked through the installation, I was struck by how much I had to use my body to view the art and read the words. I had to read with my legs, feet, torso, and arms, as well as my mind, eyes, and hands.

Sitting to read Woolf’s words.

I had to sway, walk, crouch, take a step backwards, step sideways, step forwards. I also had to stand still and wait patiently for the bright morning sunlight to change slightly and for the strips to still themselves in the shifting air so I could read Woolf’s words.

I watched as other viewers did the same. They stood still. They craned their necks upwards. They crouched. They bent. They sat down. Some even lay down, quietly giggling as the words wafted over their heads and their bodies, ruffled by the wispy breeze generated by weak air conditioning and the movements of those walking by.

About the “Kew Gardens” installation

J. Ashley Foster, conference organizer and associate professor at Fresno State University, and Jane Goldman, reader at the University of Glasgow, at the installation viewing.

Ane spent five years planning her adaptation of Woolf’s short story. It consists of 1,514 letterpress-printed sheets on translucent 18 gms kozo, a Japanese paper.

The sheets are arranged in 94 chains. each 18 sheets long, and they include all the words and punctuation marks that compose Woolf’s short story “Kew Gardens.” The printed words follow the colors named in the story, changing as each color is mentioned.

Ane explains the installation as an “organic book allowing you to walk through the pages, like insects in a flowerbed.”

Later, after the viewing, she said the installation no longer felt like it was just hers, as she had now shared it with dozens of people who love Woolf’s words.

About Ane Thon Knutsen

This was not Ane’s first exhibit focused on Woolf’s words. The associate professor of graphic design at the Oslo Academy of the Arts is internationally known for her letterpress-focused installations and artists’ books. She has won numerous awards for her work and owns and works from her private letterpress studio in Oslo.

Ane gave an artist talk on Friday evening during the conference.

Here is more about her work:

The photos below will explain the “Kew Gardens” installation far better than my words can.

View of the “Kew Gardens” installation as we walked into the Library Ellipse Gallery.

Walking through Woolf’s words.

Sometimes we had to crane our necks to get a view of the words.

Standing to the side to read Woolf.

Some folks sat to ponder Woolf’s words.

And some even lay down to get the right view.

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Charleston raising funds for early Duncan Grant painting

Posted in art, Charleston Farmhouse, Duncan Grant, tagged , , , , on Tuesday 7 May 2024| Leave a Comment »

The Charleston Trust has raised £20,000 of the £60,000 it needs to help save “Lessons in the Orchard,” from sale at auction.

“Lessons in the Orchard” (1917) by Duncan Grant. (C) The Charleston Trust

Duncan Grant’s 1917 painting is considered one of the most important paintings of early life at Charleston, as  Grant painted it the summer after he and Vanessa Bell first arrived at the Sussex home in 1916. It was also one of Vanessa Bell’s favorite paintings and has hung by her bedside since that time.

According to Charleston, “The much loved painting serves as a poignant reflection of Grant’s experiences as a conscientious objector during the First World War, depicting a scene of domestic tranquillity amidst the chaos of the era. The painting captures a different kind of family structure, offering a lens into themes of social privilege and chosen kinship that have always been present here at Charleston.”

The family who has loaned Charleston the painting since the 1980s has given Charleston the opportunity to secure its permanent place within its collection.

With the support of the Trustees of the ArtFund, Charleston has secured a grant of £40,000 towards the purchase price. However, it must raise a further £60,000 to ensure that “Lessons in the Orchard” remains in the care of Charleston’s collections team and is returned to public display for generations to enjoy.

Get more details or donate to the Lessons in the Orchard campaign.

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