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62  Virginia woolf at monk’s house 6 FIG 6 Still Life of a Vase and Vegetables, 1930, Vanessa Bell, oil on panel, 43 x 54cm, Monk’s House, East Sussex Photo: © National Trust Images © Estate of Vanessa Bell; courtesy Henrietta Garnett that Roger Fry bequeathed to Bell, which she hung in her London studio. The Matisse appears in the background of another Vanessa Bell painting, Tulips in a Vase, with Matisse (1937), and was well known to Woolf. Not only had she wanted to buy a seascape by Matisse herself, but her biography of Roger Fry records his triumphant purchase of the picture bequeathed to Bell – ‘I have bought a little Matisse, for which I longed ever since I saw it years ago in the Elder Gallery’ – and describes the position it held towards the end of his life in his rooms in Bernard Street: ‘And there were the pictures – some framed, others stood against the wall. There was the Derain picture of a spectral dog in the snow; the blue Matisse picture of ships in harbour […] always there was something new to look at.’20 If Woolf admired her sister’s paintings, she was equally enthusiastic about her patterns for embroidery. Vanessa Bell and her partner, Duncan Grant, designed many objects with embroidered coverings, and multiple examples survive at Monk’s House: a fire screen, which featured in the 1925 Independent Gallery exhibition ‘Modern Needlework’; a set of six chairs from the 1932 Lefevre Gallery music room exhibition (Fig. 8); a yellow and black mirror frame presented as a Christmas gift in 1937. Most of these are thought to have been embroidered by Duncan’s mother, Ethel Grant. What seems to be less well known is that Woolf herself was a regular and talented embroiderer, often seen with one of her sister’s patterns in her hand. A 1926 letter from Vita Sackville-West helps to set the scene: ‘I am as you see from the letterhead staying with Virginia. She is sitting opposite, embroidering a rose, a black lace fan, a box of matches and four playing cards, on a mauve canvas background, from a design by her sister, and from time to time she says “you have written enough, let us now talk about copulation”’.21 References to embroidery pop up regularly in Woolf’s letters and diaries, which blend reports of her own activities and those of her artist friends: ‘Roger again last night; scraping at his woodcuts while I sewed; the sound like that of a large pertinacious rat.’22 In 1925 she wrote to Bell with an urgent request: ‘do me a design for a chair cushion […] we have got some new dining room chairs, and I find embroidery so soothing to the head that I want to work a cushion while I am here […] I should like a large mesh, so that I can hope to finish within a lifetime […] Design, colour, everything is left to you, my only desire is that you will be quick as I want to start.’23 Two years later, Woolf was halfway through another piece when disaster struck: ‘I have an awful confession to make – really something ghastly. Either Nelly has thrown away the [embroidery] design you lent me, or the puppy has eaten it. It disappeared completely yesterday, after I had been working on it the night before […] I had traced it exactly onto the
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Virginia woolf at monk’s house 63 canvas. Could you re-paint it if I brought this? [Raymond] Mortimer admired it so much that I half suspect him.’24 One of these cushions can be glimpsed in the background of a photograph of Leonard’s niece Molly Sturgeon (Fig. 9). Sitting in the Woolfs’ comfortable upstairs sitting room, Molly leans forward towards the camera, revealing an embroidery of a heraldic figure, surrounded by one of Vanessa Bell’s distinctive circle borders. Similar patterns of repeating circles appear on the set of chairs Bell designed for the ‘combined drawing eating room’ downstairs.25 By the late 1930s, Bell’s daughter Angelica was developing her own artistic output, and Woolf seems to have enjoyed the sensuous quality of her human figures. A chair seat by Angelica depicting a full-breasted Leda embracing a lascivious swan is the only example of Woolf’s work to survive at Monk’s House today (Fig. 10). This voluptuous depiction of Leda was once accompanied by an equally daring male scene. In August 1940 Woolf wrote to Angelica from Monk’s House suggesting that she ‘take a meal here, and examine your naked boys – the embroidery I mean. I’ve picked out private parts bright red. But its a bit of a muddle [sic].’26 Less than a year later, Virginia Woolf was dead, having drowned in the river near her Sussex home. Many friends made the pilgrimage to Monk’s House to pay their respects to her grieving husband. In April 1941 Vita Sackville-West left a moving account of her final visit, revealing her sense of the intimate link between Woolf’s creativity as a female writer and a female maker: for Vita, Woolf’s spirit was embedded equally in her writing and her needlework. She found Leonard alone: ‘He was having his tea – just one tea-cup on the table where they always had tea. The house full of his flowers and all Woolf’s things 7 lying about as usual. He said Let us go somewhere more comfortable, and took me up to her sitting-room. There was her needlework on a chair and all her coloured wools hanging over a sort of little towel-horse that she had made for them. Her thimble on the table. Her scribbling-block with her writing on it. The window from which one can see the river. I said Leonard, I do not like you being alone like this. He turned those piercing blue eyes on me and said it’s the only way.’27 Nino Strachey is Head of Research and Specialist Advice for the National Trust. 8 FIG 7 Newhaven Harbour, 1936, Vanessa Bell, oil on canvas, 50 x 59cm, Monk’s House, East Sussex Photo: © National Trust Images © Estate of Vanessa Bell; courtesy Henrietta Garnett FIG 8 Embroidered chair back designed by Vanessa Bell for the ‘Music Room’ exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery, London, 1932, Monk’s House, East Sussex Photo: © National Trust Images © Estate of Vanessa Bell; courtesy Henrietta Garnett

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62  Virginia woolf at monk’s house

6 FIG 6 Still Life of a Vase and Vegetables, 1930, Vanessa Bell, oil on panel, 43 x 54cm, Monk’s House, East Sussex Photo: © National Trust Images © Estate of Vanessa Bell; courtesy Henrietta Garnett that Roger Fry bequeathed to Bell, which she hung in her London studio. The Matisse appears in the background of another Vanessa Bell painting, Tulips in a Vase, with Matisse (1937), and was well known to Woolf. Not only had she wanted to buy a seascape by Matisse herself, but her biography of Roger Fry records his triumphant purchase of the picture bequeathed to Bell – ‘I have bought a little Matisse, for which I longed ever since I saw it years ago in the Elder Gallery’ – and describes the position it held towards the end of his life in his rooms in Bernard Street: ‘And there were the pictures – some framed, others stood against the wall. There was the Derain picture of a spectral dog in the snow; the blue Matisse picture of ships in harbour […] always there was something new to look at.’20

If Woolf admired her sister’s paintings, she was equally enthusiastic about her patterns for embroidery. Vanessa Bell and her partner, Duncan Grant, designed many objects with embroidered coverings, and multiple examples survive at Monk’s House: a fire screen, which featured in the 1925 Independent Gallery exhibition ‘Modern Needlework’; a set of six chairs from the 1932 Lefevre Gallery music room exhibition (Fig. 8); a yellow and black mirror frame presented as a Christmas gift in 1937. Most of these are thought to have been embroidered by Duncan’s mother, Ethel Grant. What seems to be less well known is that Woolf herself was a regular and talented embroiderer,

often seen with one of her sister’s patterns in her hand. A 1926 letter from Vita Sackville-West helps to set the scene: ‘I am as you see from the letterhead staying with Virginia. She is sitting opposite, embroidering a rose, a black lace fan, a box of matches and four playing cards, on a mauve canvas background, from a design by her sister, and from time to time she says “you have written enough, let us now talk about copulation”’.21

References to embroidery pop up regularly in Woolf’s letters and diaries, which blend reports of her own activities and those of her artist friends: ‘Roger again last night; scraping at his woodcuts while I sewed; the sound like that of a large pertinacious rat.’22 In 1925 she wrote to Bell with an urgent request: ‘do me a design for a chair cushion […] we have got some new dining room chairs, and I find embroidery so soothing to the head that I want to work a cushion while I am here […] I should like a large mesh, so that I can hope to finish within a lifetime […] Design, colour, everything is left to you, my only desire is that you will be quick as I want to start.’23 Two years later, Woolf was halfway through another piece when disaster struck: ‘I have an awful confession to make – really something ghastly. Either Nelly has thrown away the [embroidery] design you lent me, or the puppy has eaten it. It disappeared completely yesterday, after I had been working on it the night before […] I had traced it exactly onto the

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