THE FAMOUS WOMEN DINNER SERVICE
We explore the collection of 50 portrait plates created by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell
As Charleston, home of the Bloomsbury Group, opens an exhibition of 50 feared-lost portrait plates, Dominique Corle paints the service’s journey, from the original artistic concept, through the set’s missing decades and to its triumphant return
‘There was a risk the plates could have been bought by a private buyer or sold separately or gone overseas. By returning them to Charleston we are saving them for the public.’
Some are shown in proud pro! le as be!ts their status as queen of an ancient civilisation. Some gaze just past the viewer’s ear with inscrutable expressions, tempting us to search beyond their billowing gowns, shining jewels and tumbling hair for the real person beneath. Others look away to the middle distance, as if lost in thought. Occasionally your look is met head on, returned in a direct gaze of interest or perhaps fearlessness.
This remarkable gallery of 50 famous faces covers the sweep of history from ancient times to the 20th century, and all of the subjects – bar one – are women. They are women drawn from world history, not just the West, examples of great queens, writers, beauties and performers. Helen of Troy is here, alongside the Queen of Sheba, Elizabeth I and Cleopatra. Here sits Pocahontas, and there Christina Rosse"i. Among the writers are Sappho, George Eliot, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. Elizabeth Barre" Browning is pictured with her dog, while Nell Gwyn, Marie Antoine"e, Greta Garbo and even Jezebel can also be picked out from the rows of faces.
The Famous Women Dinner Service, as this collection of portrait plates is known, might sound like a contemporary feminist work of art (and many of the plates are disarming in their freshness and modernity), but they were actually painted in 1932 by the two remaining people depicted in the set – Bloomsbury artist Vanessa Bell (sister of Virginia Wool #), and her sometime lover and lifelong friend and collaborator Duncan Grant (the single male is he).
The plates were painted at Charleston, Bell and Grant’s home in the Sussex countryside (see box) and it is here, in one of a suite of new galleries that opened in September, that the plates have gone on display as a public collection for the ! rst time. Their journey back to Charleston has been a long one. For many years they disappeared from view and were assumed lost or destroyed. Then there was the challenge of raising the
money to buy them, but to those involved, there was no question of them not coming home to Charleston.
‘ There was a signi cant risk that they could have been bought by a private buyer or sold separately or gone overseas,’ says Nathaniel Hepburn, Director and Chief Executive of the Charleston Trust. ‘ By returning them to Charleston we are saving them for the public and allowing them nally to be seen.’
‘ We knew we had to grab them with both hands,’ adds Darren Clarke, Head of Collections, Research and Exhibitions. ‘ Not only because they were made here, but because they are part of the creative energy of this place. They sum up the spirit of Charleston and the magic that we want to get across to our visitors.’
Dinner is Served
Bell and Grant rst had the idea for the portraits when they were commissioned in 1931 by their friend and patron, the art historian and museum director Sir Kenneth Clark, to create a personal dinner service for
According to Kenneth Clark’s autobiography, he saw the commission as an opportunity to encourage Bell and Grant’s design work.
him. According to his autobiography, he saw the commission as an opportunity to encourage their design work, which had begun with the Omega Workshops and the decoration of their own home, Charleston.
Clark’s wife, Jane, managed the project, regularly corresponding with Bell and Grant. But it was the artists who decided on a gallery to recognise and celebrate the contribution of great women – a subject that was close to their hearts. ‘ Virginia Woolf’s Orlando was published in 1928 and that’s very much about repositioning women in history,’ explains Darren Clarke. ‘ These would have been familiar ideas in the conversations at Charleston, where women absolutely had equality within the group, and they were central to the thinking of Bell and Woolf.’
It is likely that Bell was also in !uenced by the work of her great aunt, the portrait photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who held her "rst exhibition in 1865 at the South Kensington Museum (now the V& A). ‘Cameron worked in two worlds; on the one hand taking photographs of children, servants and her niece, who was Bell’s mother and, on the other, doing these official portraits of eminent Victorians – writers, thinkers, philosophers – who were
all men. Perhaps for Bell there was an element of redressing the balance,’ says Darren.
For the plates, Bell and Grant chose to recreate images that already existed. ‘ Pocahontas, for example, is from a famous etching of her,’ says Darren. ‘And Charlo!e Brontë and Jane Austen are recognisable from their portraits in the National Portrait Gallery.’ First drawing the image on paper, the artists used carbon paper to transfer that onto a biscuit-" red Wedgwood blank before painting them in a limited pale!e of blue, black, yellow and brown. They were then returned to Wedgwood to be "red. Bell and Grant worked together, perhaps taking it in turns to paint the borders and the portraits – and no one knows whose work is which.
The "nished plates are believed to have been a surprise to Sir Clark, who was anticipating Bloomsbury-style decoration (perhaps just the borders), but not for each to be a full scale work of art. The plates were used rarely and carefully (their condition is immaculate), with friends of the Clarks remembering them displayed on a shelf in their home. In 1983, when Clark died, they passed to his second wife, and were eventually sold by an auction house in Germany to an unknown buyer. Nothing was seen or heard of them for a generation. In 2014 the Tate did its best to track them down for an exhibition on Clark’s contribution to British art, but to no avail. ‘ There was a feeling that if the Tate couldn’t "nd them, then they must be lost for good,’ explains Darren.
Back From The Blue
Then suddenly, last year, they reappeared. A #er decades without a whisper or hint of their whereabouts, a client of the Piano Nobile gallery in London, a specialist in Bloomsbury art, revealed, to everyone’s
astonishment, that they had the full set. ‘ I went to see them at the gallery,’ says Darren. ‘ They got them out of these mountains of bubble wrap and laid them on the carpet. It was extraordinary. I’m used to seeing Bell and Grant’s ceramics in a well-worn state. But these were as if fresh from the kiln.’
Keen for the plates to be returned to Charleston, the gallery agreed a signi cantly discounted price with the Trust. Charleston secured half a million pounds from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund and the Quentin Bell Memorial Fund, leaving £100,000 to raise through a public plate-sponsoring scheme. The challenge has been taken up by many women in the public eye who have each paid £ 2,000 to sponsor a plate of their choice. Among them are Joanna Lumley, who chose actress Ellen Terry, HRH the Duchess of Cornwall, who chose Jane Austen, and Annie Sloan, who chose the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova. The plates of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant have been reserved for multiple smaller donations.
‘ The vendor has been very generous in giving us the time to raise the funds,’ concludes The Charleston Trust’s Nathaniel Hepburn, ‘and we are well on our way to bringing the service home for good.’