Vanessa Bell - Sketches In Pen And Ink: A Bloomsbury Notebook

PIMLICO

SKETCHES IN PEN AND INK

Lia Giachero, PhD, the editor of this volume, is a young art historian from Italy, who read and became fascinated by Bells unpublished writings while she was researching a thesis for the University of Siena on the portraits of Vanessa Bell.

Angelica Garnett, who introduces this volume and collaborated with Lia Giachero on the editing, is herself an artist and the daughter of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

VANESSA BELL

Edited and with an Afterword by Lia Giachero

Prologue by Angelica Garnett

To Daylight from Darkness: Vanessa Bell as an Artist
by Lia Giachero

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Published by Pimlico 1998

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Copyright The Estate of Vanessa Bell 1997
Prologue Angelica Garnett 1997
Selection, editorial matter and essay, To Daylight from Darkness
Lia Giachero 1997

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain by
The Hogarth Press/Chatto & Windus Ltd, 1997
Pimlico edition 1998

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ISBN 0-7126-6603-6

My first thanks go to Angelica Garnett, not simply for permission to publish her mothers memoirs and for her contribution to this book, but because she encouraged and helped me at every stage of the work and never lost faith in my capacity to succeed. Without her it could not have been completed; this also applies to the late Professor Quentin Bell, who was executor of Vanessa Bells literary estate, and to his wife Mrs Anne Olivier Bell, who provided me with a great deal of help and information.

Others who supplied me with material were my friend Sally Brown, Curator of Modern Literary Manuscripts at the British Library, and her assistant Christopher Fletcher. Invaluable, too, was the help of Tony Bradshaw of the Bloomsbury Workshop, of Paul Evans from Sussex, together with half the booksellers in London! And of course of Alison Samuel of Chatto & Windus, who decided to take the risk of trusting an unknown Italian editor.

A book is never merely the result of the research done to complete it; it is also the fruit of ideas gathered over the years, which come to maturity just at the right moment. For everything I know about the Bloomsbury Group I have to thank Professor Enrico Crispolti, my tutor at the Scuola di Specializzazione in Archeologia e Storia dellArte at the University of Siena, and Dr Roveno Batignani; Frances Partridge, Richard Shone, Frances Spalding, Regina Marler, Francis Ames-Lewis, Judith Collins and Professor S. P. Rosenbaum; all the teachers and fellow-students of the Bloomsbury and the Bloomsbury Group July 1991 Birkbeck College summer school (London); Tina Jeffrey and her staff at Charleston Farmhouse; the staff of the Witt Library, of the Courtauld Institute of Art Book Library, of the National Art Library, of the Tate Gallery Archive, of the National Portrait Gallery, of Kings College Library (and Modern Archive) in Cambridge, of the Hogarth Press Archive at the University of Reading, of Christies and Sothebys archives, and of the Anthony dOffay Gallery.

Last, but not least, let me thank my friend Marina Ganzerli, who fed, watered, reproved and entertained me in her house in London; Hazel Orchard of Hove, who, despite not being an admirer of the Bloomsbury Group, was responsible for my first visit to Monks House; Joanna Braithwaite and her daughter, Anka Bednarek and her two marvellous Polish friends, Sir Alan and Lady Leslie, Jean Moorcroft Wilson and Cecil Woolf, and all those who made me feel as though London were my second home; Janet Dunolly, my English coach since I was fifteen; Valery Rodgers; my mother, Anna Boatti Giachero, who, among the infinite number of things she has done for me, helped me to correct the manuscript; and my father, Mario Giachero, who has never doubted that I would follow my star.

LIA GIACHERO 1997

The woodcuts, drawings, illustrations and decorative motifs in this volume are all by Vanessa Bell.

The single flower after chapter Notes on Virginia's Childhood is from Kew Gardens (London, Hogarth Press, 1927 edition) by Virginia Woolf. The sketch of Virginia Stephen skating is from a letter by Virginia to her brother Thoby, 1 February 1897 (The Flight of the Mind, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. I, ed. N. Nicolson and J. Trautmann Banks, London, Hogarth Press, 1993). The pencil drawing of Roger Fry, c.1914 is reproduced by permission of the Witt Library, Courtauld Institute, London.

The woodcuts originally appeared as follows: as frontispiece to the story A Haunted House in Monday or Tuesday (London, Hogarth Press, 1921) by Virginia Woolf; p.54 as frontispiece to Kew Gardens (London, Hogarth Press, 1919 edition) by Virginia Woolf; p.66* as frontispiece to A Society in Monday or Tuesday; as frontispiece to An Unwritten Novel in Monday or Tuesday; Dahlias in Original Woodcuts by Various Artists (London, Omega Workshops, 1918); as frontispiece to The String Quartet in Monday or Tuesday; The Tub in Original Woodcuts by Various Artists (London, Omega Workshops, 1918).

The illustration after chapter Notes on Bloomsbury is from the dust jacket for The Common Reader (London, Hogarth Press, 1925) by Virginia Woolf.

Photographs: the frontispiece of Vanessa Stephen in 1905, painting a commissioned portrait of Lady Robert Cecil and the photo after Lia Giachero's essay, a late photo of Vanessa Bell, are reproduced by permission of the Tate Gallery Archive, London.

It is not known exactly how many memoirs Vanessa Bell wrote for the Memoir Club. Those which remain are the following: Memoir Relating to Mrs Jackson, Notes on Virginias Childhood, Life at Hyde Park Gate after 1897, My Sister-in-Law, Notes on Bloomsbury, Memories of Roger Fry, Old Bloomsbury, The Strange Story of Mary Elizabeth Wilson, Notes on the Death of Lytton Strachey (unfinished), A Brother as Chaperone: a visit to the Chamberlains (fragment), Introduction to Fourteen Letters from Leslie Stephen to Mary Fisher. The first six of these, together with the Lecture Given at Leighton Park School are contained in this book; the others are unpublished, except for The Strange Story of Mary Elizabeth Wilson which appeared in