Includes bibliographical references (pages 266-269) and index.

"Few groups of artists and writers have been the object of so much myth-making as the Bloomsbury group which flourished in London during the first thirty years of this century. Bloomsbury has not only been profoundly influential and productive in every sphere of British artistic life, its members have become objects of curiosity and veneration, even of disgust, that fascinate the whole of the English-speaking world. This book describes in particular the artists, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, who were at the centre of the group, who played a leading part in the interplay of personal and intellectual life which characterized it, and whose works have recently been the subject of much new interest. Richard Shone shows how in addition to Bloomsbury's writers, its painters were of considerable importance, and played a central role in the development of painting in Britain in the twentieth century. Their work, sometimes neglected but always of interest to a few, is among the most lively and original produced in England; here the Bloomsbury painters come alive among their friends, admirers and sitters, their works illustrated by a large number of reproductions in colour and black and white." "The picture that emerges of their rich cultural and social life, their links with Picasso, Derain and Sickert, their wide sympathies and immensely serious attitude to painting is in strong contrast to the habitual view of them as unadventurous and provincial."--Jacket

British Library not licensed to copy,0.,Uk

SACFinal081324