A poignant portrait of the artist Vanessa Bell, made within days of her death in 1961 by her sometime lover and lifelong friend Duncan Grant, has been rediscovered among family papers and donated to the famous home of the Bloomsbury Group, Charleston farmhouse in East Sussex.
The drawing in soft pencil and biro, from an angle suggesting Grant was sitting by her bedside, was rediscovered among family papers during research for a forthcoming exhibition of the work of both artists at Tate Britain. It may have been made just after Bell’s death, though she could just be resting peacefully with eyes closed.
Although Grant has dated the drawing “Friday April 14”, Bell actually died at the farmhouse on a week prior. In a statement from Charleston, now a museum and archive, Darren Clarke, head of collections and research, says that in later years, Grant and his friends went through masses of the work in his studio identifying and labelling pictures, so the date may have been added in error years later.
“What seems very likely here is that Duncan knew this drawing had been made around Vanessa’s death and later added a date from memory. He got remarkably close, but apparently not quite close enough. Everything about the drawing itself – its viewpoint, its intimacy and its extraordinary economy – suggests someone sitting quietly beside Vanessa’s bed and drawing the face he had known for half a century.”
The friendship and artistic partnership of Grant and Bell was one of the happiest and longest lasting of the tangled affairs of the group. Although Grant was gay and a former lover of Bell’s brother Adrian, they were lovers for a time and in 1918 had a child, Angelica—who went on to marry David Garnett, another of Grant’s lovers. Grant and Bell lived and worked at the 17th-century farmhouse for decades, covering many of the interiors with striking painted decoration. He outlived her by 17 years, and in 1978 was buried beside her in the churchyard of St Peter’s in Firle, near their home.
Grant was long regarded as the most talented artist of the group, and the first major solo exhibition of Bell’s work came only in 2017 at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. At that time most of her paintings in the Tate collection were languishing in storage, but her reputation has been growing steadily in recent years. The Tate is making amends with a major exhibition of work by both artists, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury (12 November 2026 - 11 April 2027) at Tate Britain.
Although Charleston is the largest lender to the Tate exhibition, including the entire contents of Grant’s studio, the drawing will only be included in the exhibition catalogue. It will go on public display for the first time at Charleston in May 2027, when the studio reopens after major conservation work.
The drawing has been donated to Charleston as part of the 50 for 50 campaign which aims to bring 50 major works by the group back to the farmhouse in time for 2030, the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Charleston Trust, which runs and maintains the museum.
Nathaniel Hepburn, the director and CEO of Charleston, says in a statement on the discovery: “I found this drawing deeply moving when I first saw it. We know Duncan’s drawings of Vanessa so intimately, made over the course of their long friendship, that the discovery of a previously unknown work is remarkable in itself. But there is something incredibly poignant about imagining Duncan sitting beside Vanessa, drawing her after her death.“
