VANESSA BELL
London 1879 - 1961 Firle, East Sussex
Ref: CD 111
The pond at Charleston looking towards Tilton
Signed with initials on the reverse: VB
Oil on canvas: 23 ½ x 19 ½ in / 59.7 x 49.5 cm
Frame size: 31 x 27 in / 78.7 x 68.6 cm
Painted circa 1950
Provenance:
Sotheby’s London, 23rd May 1984, lot 106
The Maas Gallery, London;
private collection, acquired from the above in 2011
The names Charleston and Tilton are inextricably woven into the social history of Bloomsbury from the 1920s onwards. Both were the names of rented properties on the Firle estate in the South Downs in East Sussex. Lord Gage of nearby Firle Place was the landlord. Vanessa Bell rented Charleston in 1916; Maynard Keynes took a long lease of Tilton House in 1925 at the time of his marriage to Lydia Lopokova, the great Russian dancer.
Both houses were at the centre of working farms and there was a good deal of farm traffic between the two. In Bell’s painting the side of Tilton House can be seen – white wall and grey roof – among various farm buildings built in brick and flint. At the time this work was painted - circa 1948-50 – Lydia Keynes, now widowed, was living in Tilton, its rooms adorned with many of the Post-Impressionist works collected by Maynard Keynes. They were secluded houses reached by unmade tracks from the main road. Charleston was a retreat for Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant who both had studios in the house. At Tilton Keynes enjoyed peace during the writing of some of his seminal economic texts.
The view of Tilton from Charleston appears in many paintings by Bell and Grant. The present work, with its spring-time flourish of fresh greens, contains two elements that Bell particularly doted on – she liked subjects, as she once told Roger Fry, that were not far from her door and enjoyed water in a landscape with its subtle reflections and suggestion of movement. Here, she has taken her easel a little way from the house and looked across the farm pond on a late spring day, just before the flowering of the yellow flags that skirted the water. It is a perfect encapsulation of the tranquillity Bell savoured at Charleston.
Richard Shone, author of The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant [1999]
