Vanessa Bell

Interior with a Table

1921

On loan

Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge, UK): Virginia Woolf

Artist: Vanessa Bell 1879–1961
Medium: Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions: Support: 540 x 641 mm
frame: 703 x 819 x 72 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Bequeathed by Frank Hindley Smith 1940
Reference: N05078

Display caption

Bell and Duncan Grant had established their home in rural Sussex in 1916, but they continued to seek inspiration in the France, making frequent visits to Paris and the South.

This picture was painted at La Maison Blanche, a villa just outside St Tropez which they rented from Bell’s friend Rose Vildrac. They stayed there for five months from October 1921, with Bell’s children Quentin, Julian and Angelica. Bell wrote ‘It’s delicious to be in the South – one forgets how nice it is – all the colours and the light and space and everything looking so baked through’.

Gallery label, July 2004

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Catalogue entry

N05078 INTERIOR WITH A TABLE 1921

Inscr. ‘VB 1921’ b.r.
Canvas, 21 1/4×25 1/4 (54×64).
Bequeathed by Frank Hindley Smith 1940.
Coll: Frank Hindley Smith.
Exh: (?) London Group, April–May 1923 (68), as ‘Interior’

Painted at Saint-Tropez in a house belonging to Mme Vildrac which the artist took for two or three months in the winter of 1921–2 (letter from the artist, 22 February 1956). Duncan Grant's ‘South of France’ of 1922 (No.4443 below) was painted at Saint-Tropez at the same time.

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