Drawing of Vanessa Bell

Final drawing of Vanessa Bell by
Duncan Grant in April 1961.

 A newly discovered portrait of Vanessa Bell by her partner and friend, Duncan Grant, is the final depiction of her before she died, experts say. The pen and biro drawing has been given to  Charleston, the art museum based in their former residence near Lewes, by an anonymous donor. The drawing depicts Bell, sister of Virginia Woolf and a celebrated Bloomsbury artist in her own right, as she lay dying from bronchitis in her countryside home. It was found during preparations for a new exhibition about the couple at the Tate Britain. Bell was 81 when she died on 7 April 1961, and Grant dated the portrait to the following week. He lived for another 17 years without the woman his biographer, Frances Spalding, called his “life partner”.

 

Art critic, Clive Bell.

Dr Sophie Pickford specialist in the Bloomsbury group at Cambridge University, said the portrait was “extraordinarily moving” and captured a “last moment of physical connection” between the couple. Grant and Bell were artists who worked side by side, sometimes on the same canvas. Bell was married to the art critic Clive Bell and Grant was in a relationship with the economist John Maynard Keynes. According to Christopher Jones, a researcher at UCL working on the Bloomsbury group, that relationship only strengthened their bond. “Duncan’s queerness meant his relationship with Vanessa was always something else. But they were the most stable people in each other’s lives.”

Duncan Grant self-portrait 1909

In 1918, Grant and Bell had a child together, Angelica Garnett, whose paternity was hidden from her until she turned 18. In her memoir, she wrote that finding out Grant was her real father left her “unable to contain the feeling that, with such a father, I had been marked for a special destiny”. 

Interest in Grant and Bell seems to be surging. From 12 November, many of their works will go on display at Tate Britain for the new exhibition Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury, and the pair are currently main characters in the new James Graham play The Standard of Living. But their popularity is no surprise to Pickford. “There’s something about the spontaneity of the way they created their art, and created their own worlds around them, that is enticing to people,” she said. “It’s raw and energetic. They are an amazing vehicle through which to consider for oneself what is a good life.”

Angelica Garnett as a girl.

 Grant painted Bell throughout her life, but this newly unearthed drawing is “the coda in the 50 years of portraiture that he did of her”, said Darren Clarke, the head of collections at Charleston. “It has the power of those moments when you’re waiting to say goodbye,” he said. It was previously thought that a charcoal drawing from earlier in 1961 was the final portrait of Bell economist, John Maynard Keynes.

Photo of Vanessa Bell by Roger Fry 1916.