Vanessa Bell

Chrysanthemums

1920

Not on display

Artist: Vanessa Bell 1879–1961
Medium: Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions: Support: 610 × 457 mm
frame: 776 × 630 × 80 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Presented by the Contemporary Art Society 1924
Reference: N03836

Display caption

Bell often painted flowerpieces and frequently used flowers in her interior decorative work. Stylised flowers are a dominant theme in the dust jacket designs she designed for books written by her sister, Virginia Woolf.

Bell rejected the brighter colours she’d used before the war, and in the 1920s and 30s painted flowerpieces and still lifes with rich but sombre colour harmonies. The vase of flowers here is placed on a mirror.

This work was presented to the Tate by the Contemporary Art Society in 1924 and was the first work by Bell to enter the Collection.

Gallery label, August 2004

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Catalogue entry

N03836 CHRYSANTHEMUMS 1920

Inscr. ‘V B 1920’ b.r.
Canvas, 24×18 (61×46).
Presented by the Contemporary Art Society 1924.
Coll: Purchased by the C.A.S. 1923.
Exh: C.A.S., Paintings and Drawings, Grosvenor House, June–July 1923 (26), as ‘Chrysanthemums’; Arts Council and tour, 1964 (40).
Repr: C.A.S. Report 1919–24, 1924, pl.4; Sir John Rothenstein, British Art since 1900, 1962, pl.49

Previously catalogued as ‘Flowers in a Jug’. The same jug appears in a watercolour ‘Flowers’ by Duncan Grant, repr. Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, 1930, pl.16.

Published in:
Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, I