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Posts Tagged ‘Duncan Grant’

‘The firm of Bell and Grant’ and the Famous Women Dinner Service

Posted in Bloomsbury, tagged Bloomsbury Group, Duncan Grant, Famous Women Dinner Service, Vanessa Bell on Monday 27 July 2015| 1 Comment »

Here’s a piece from The Charleston Attic blog on the 140-piece dinner service featuring famous women created by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. It is one of the largest commissioned works produced by the artists and was commissioned in 1932.

‘The firm of Bell and Grant’ and the Famous Women Dinner Service.

The Virginia Woolf plate is pictured in Diane Gillespie’s The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (1988, 1991), as illustration 4.13 on p. 199. Gillespie discusses the plates briefly on p. 198. The plate pictures a young Virginia Woolf in profile with her long hair secured at her neck or pinned up; it’s difficult to make out which.

According to Gillespie, the plates were divided into four groups and Woolf’s plate is included in the writers’ group. Woolf’s plate features a border of alternating squiggles and large dots. In a July 27, 2015, message to the VWoolf Listserv, Gillespie noted that she was able to see a number of the plates during the 1980s in the home of Lady Clark.

Ann Donlon wrote a Oct. 9, 2013, post about the plates on her blog after a visit to Charleston. Titled Dinner Plates, it includes images.

Also see Woolf on a plate, a 2009 post on Blogging Woolf about Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party that includes a Woolf plate.

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New song cycle features Virginia Woolf’s letters

Posted in Bloomsbury, Duncan Grant, music, Vanessa Bell, tagged Duncan Grant, letters, Richard Barnard, song cycle, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf on Saturday 25 July 2015| Leave a Comment »

Three songs from a new song cycle using Virginia Woolf’s letters to her sister, painter Vanessa Bell, are available online via SoundCloud.

Composed by Richard Barnard, they are titled ‘As A Writer‘, Nessa and Duncan, and A Dancing Light. They were recorded by Rhys Maslen at St Augustine’s Chapel, Bristol, and this part of the project was supported by Arts Council Wales.

Here are the descriptions of the songs, as copied from Barnard’s blog:

‘As A Writer’: Woolf frequently used Vanessa’s art as a metaphor for her own work. Here she describes the writing process as feeling beauty “which is almost entirely colour”, condensing ideas like pouring “a large jug of champagne over a hairpin”.
‘Nessa and Duncan’: A brilliantly teasing letter in which Woolf imagines a scene at Vanessa and Duncan Grant’s home as they discuss her recently published novel To The Lighthouse (clearly nervous of their judgement!)
‘A Dancing Light’: Part of a letter of 1937 written soon after the death of Vanessa’s son Julian in the Spanish Civil War.

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A Summer Salon: A Snapshot of British Art Between the Wars

Posted in art, Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf, tagged Bloomsbury art, Charleston Farmhouse, Duncan Grant, World War I on Wednesday 13 May 2015| Leave a Comment »

This is a wonderful piece that puts Bloomsbury art in the social, political and cultural context of the 1920s-1930s.

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The Bell of the Ball

Posted in Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf, tagged Angelica Garnett, Bloomsbury Group, Charleston Farmhouse, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf on Friday 1 May 2015| Leave a Comment »

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Life in Squares coming to BBC this year

Posted in Bloomsbury, Charleston Farmhouse, films, Woolf on TV, tagged Bloomsbury Group, Duncan Grant, Life in Squares, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf on Wednesday 4 March 2015| 4 Comments »

Life in Squares, the BBC Two show that tells the story of the tangled relationships of the Bloomsbury Group from 1901 to 1945, will be on the air this year, shown as three 60-minute episodes.

The program was announced by the BBC last summer.

Filming also began last summer at Charleston Farmhouse, known as Bloomsbury in the country, for scenes set in the 1930s and 1940s. In the rooms where filming took place, much of the original collection was removed, and the art department improvised to make the place more bohemian than it may have been in real life. Domestic clutter that is part of the staging includes posed photographs of the actors based on old family photographs. Filming in London took place last fall.

Two actors play the role of each character in the show, which complicated the casting process. One bit of casting seems pitch-perfect: James Norton, the crime-solving vicar on Grantchester, will play Duncan Grant. Lydia Leonard of Ambassadors will play a young Virginia Wolf and Phoebe Fox of Switch will star as a young Vanessa Bell.

Discussions with Vanessa’s granddaughter Virginia Nicholson were key in making the show a reality.

“Life in Squares gets under the skin of the Bloomsbury group to lay bare the very human and emotional story of a group of people determined to find their own path in life,” said Lucy Bedford, executive producer.

“At heart, Life in Squares is about family: about the families we try to escape, the ones we end up creating and the different kinds of damage love can do,” she added.