Description:
faceless woman with long hair swept up, wearing green trimmed lilac dress with white around neck, seated in orange wing chair with green patterned cloth draped over its back set against light green-blue wall, her proper right elbow on chair's arm with her hand hanging loose over her lap
Label Text:
This portrait by Vanessa Bell of her sister, author Virginia Woolf, dates from around the same time as Bell’s painting of the landscape around Asheham House (also on view), where Woolf lived with her husband, Leonard.
At the time this portrait was painted in 1912, the thirty-year-old, newly-married Woolf was a prolific literary journalist and critic whose first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), was yet to be published. She had been a part of the iconoclastic Bloomsbury group since 1904 and in 1910 had joined the Women’s Suffrage movement.
Bell painted another portrait of Woolf the same year, in the same orange armchair (illustrated at left). Although SCMA’s portrait is entirely featureless, it conveys much of Woolf’s character and elegant bearing.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+2002.21 |
