Despite years of study, I am yet edging up to an acknowledgement of myself as an art historian. Laggard in this as academic study came mid-life, the ‘mid’ now itself almost a lifetime ago. Even now, however, nothing of what I do feels like real work which perhaps explains why I can’t pin myself with a profession. Real work, whether it feels like it or not, included a jaunt to Charleston, near Lewes.
Even in the guise of a good day out, which it was, visiting Charleston, the Sussex home of Bloomsbury Group artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, was yesterday perfectly timed with glorious spring weather and with the gardens that surround the house in full bloom. It left me in little doubt the subject of the floral still life in our collection could have been gathered at will from the garden just outside the studio Grant and Bell shared at the back of the house.
Perhaps some few of my gentle readers know that Keith McCullar and I have long been collectors of the work of Duncan Grant with an interest stirred originally by our proximity to one of his studios kept in what amounted to only a bedsitting room just around the corner from our old home in Islington, north London. This link was vivified by our contact with the scene painter Sebastian Minton, Grant’s near neighbour in Canonbury Square, and Mary Cosh, a local historian who said she was once a figure model for Grant. That of course linked up concurrently and almost mystically with my reading art history at University College London, with the department then sited in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, and partially occupying the former home of Bloomsbury Group notable John Maynard Keynes.
This all sounds made up but I assure you it is not, and the net effect of it was that it brought the work of Grant and Bell to our attention. With all that, had we not, once we became aware of it, actually liked much of their work, particularly that of Grant, the paragraph above would just be a story we might tell over a glass of wine at a gallery opening. By the way, we, or I should say ‘I’, have done so on more occasions than has proved enjoyable for Keith McCullar.
Charleston has long been a site we had wanted to visit, long delayed with one thing or another, although we’ve been interested in and collecting Grant’s work for over 25 years. The house adjoins a working farm that Bell and Grant never had anything to do with. I am aware that Bell spent quite a bit of time working in the garden, though I suspect, if the exterior were of a piece with the interior of the house, the gardens these days are probably much better kept.
The interior of the house, however, is painted top to toe with fanciful scenes, images and flourishes that are mostly the work of Duncan Grant. The walls themselves are hung with paintings by both Bell and Grant, with imagery, including some sculpture, depicting Bloomsbury Group worthies including Lytton Strachey and Bell’s own sister, Virginia Woolf.
I suspect, however, that the fanciful vivacity of the decoration inside the house has very much to do with Grant’s character, friendly and amorous with a series of gay liaisons that extended up to the end of his very long life.
That Vanessa Bell was more acquiescent than tolerant of Grant’s sex life is the general run of opinion and perhaps it is this that makes very many of Grant’s depictions of Bell of a woman who does not present a happy face to the world, if, in fact, Grant has painted her face at all. Very many pictures show Bell at work in the garden, say, with distance or pose or viewpoint obscuring her face.
One thing that struck Keith and me was how far out in the country Charleston is, some seven miles from the nearest train station in Lewes. During the early years of their occupation, it would have taken some time to get to the farm and in the phrase Keith and I have come to use when describing a location pleasant but otherwise remote from other amenities, when you’re there, you’re there. And Grant wasn’t there all the time, witness the studios- that worked as well as trysting spots- he kept in various places in London, including that in our old neighbourhood in Islington.
The bright colours and jollity of Grant’s decorations within the Charleston farmhouse dissemble what was not always a happy house. With the interior in particular kept as it was at the time of Grant’s death in 1978, it is nearly a shrine, but with the house and its pictures and decorations hardly inert, they show the effect of years and perhaps it is this that compounds the spiritually mournful feel of the place. The gardens, of course, can be renewed, as they clearly are, with ministrations currently in the charge of a talented gardener. The inside of the house cannot be kept in the same way.
Mind you, I am glad I went and no question, it did provide some insight into the lives and consequent productions of its two most famous residents. And, in reflection, perhaps it is my own discipline that makes a methodology of building context to add a sight of meaning to that production. And, too, contextual theory can only go so far- Bell and Grant are long dead and it is impossible to measure how much of their spirit remains about the place. Even so, and even on a brilliantly sunny day, there is more than a hint of melancholy that lingers about the place.