Virginia woolf at monk’s house 59
‘That a woman should hold a show of pictures in Bond Street […] is not usual, nor, perhaps, altogether to be commended. For it implies, I fancy, some study of the nude, and while for many ages it has been admitted that women are naked and bring nakedness to birth, it was held, until sixty years ago that for a woman to look upon nakedness with the eye of an artist, and not simply with the eye of mother, wife or mistress was corruptive of her innocency and destructive of her domesticity.’1 So wrote Virginia Woolf in February 1930 in her introduction to the catalogue accompanying an exhibition of works by her sister, Vanessa Bell.
In her foreword, Woolf addressed some of the barriers to female creativity that she had raised in A Room of One’s Own (1929) and would do again in Three Guineas (1938). Woolf felt that women painters faced even more obstacles than women writers: not only had they been barred from painting male nudes, and were thus unable to complete training at the Royal Academy, but materials and studio space were also expensive and hard to come by. As Bell herself concluded ruefully, the professional female artist was all too often distracted by domestic cares: ‘It’s so terribly difficult to paint seriously when one is responsible for other things and hasn’t room and space to oneself and we females have to struggle for it all our lives.’2
Woolf was determined that Bell’s paintings should not be taken for the flimsy productions of a lady amateur – ‘flower pieces done under the shade of a white umbrella’.3 Nor should they be judged purely against works produced by professional female artists: ‘Berthe Morisot, Marie
Laurencin, Vanessa Bell – such is the stereotyped phrase which comes to mind when her name is mentioned.’ 4 For Woolf, Bell was a great artist – a painter of genius, evading gender categorisation: ‘One says […] Mrs Bell is a woman; and then half way round the room one says, But she may be a man [...] Her pictures do not betray her. Their reticence is inviolable. That is why they intrigue and draw us on […] she is a painter’s painter […] They give us an emotion. They offer a puzzle.’5
Woolf was a patron as well as a promoter: she gave her sister money to spend on models, funded openingnight parties and bought individual works whenever her bank balance allowed. Many of these survive at her Sussex home, Monk’s House, and provide a telling record of her evolving visual taste. In Virginia Woolf and the Arts (2010), Victoria Rosner notes that Monk’s House ‘has not attracted much interest thus far from scholars of the Bloomsbury Group; most critics focus on Virginia Woolf in London […] In the public eye, Monk’s House places a distant second to Charleston, Bell and Grant’s Sussex home a few miles away.’6 The copious secondary literature on Woolf has tended to overlook her personal patronage: her purchase, using money earned from her own writing, of carefully chosen objects, which she proudly displayed in the house she loved (Fig. 2).
For Woolf, the assembly of beautiful possessions became a symbol of financial independence and free choice. Following the commercial success of Orlando in 1928, she joyfully recorded the excitement of spending money she had earned herself in exactly the way she
2
FIG 1 Virginia Woolf (1882– 1941) at Monk’s House, in her first-floor sitting room filled with works of art commissioned from her sister Vanessa Bell (1879–1961); shown here are fireplace tiles depicting fruit and flowers (1930) and Still Life of a Vase and Vegetables (1930) (photo: c. 1933) Courtesy Houghton Library, Harvard University FIG 2 The Sitting Room at Monk’s House, showing the set of chairs designed by Vanessa Bell (back right) and the chair seat embroidered by Virginia Woolf (front left) Photo: © National Trust Images/Caroline Arber
