Charleston

FARMHOUSE

Artists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell moved to Charleston in 1916 and proceeded to treat every surface as a canvas. They covered walls, doors, fireplaces and furniture with their hand-painted murals, and also made or designed the majority of the furnishings; from the wallpaper, to the rugs, textiles, lamps and ceramics. Bell and Grant were key members of the Bloomsbury Set and Charleston was constantly filled with the writers, artists and academics – including Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and EM Forster – who gathered there to exchange ideas.

The house became associated with radical thinking on gender, sexual politics and the role of women, not just through its association with Bloomsbury, but also through Grant and Bell’s own unconventional domestic set up.

LEFT Art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, who commissioned the plates; Greta Garbo and Catherine the Great, Duncan Grant 1932 and Vanessa Bell 1932.