Bloomsbury Group – Sites of British Modernism

Charleston Farmhouse

Gabriella D'angelo Bloomsbury Group, Sussex May 3, 2018May 3, 2018 0 Comment

Charleston Farmhouse

The farmhouse is located in the Sussex countryside, set within the Sussex Downs, and one mile from Firle. The farmhouse is “large and unpretentious;” inside there was plenty of space for studios and rooms for guests. Outside of the house was a country landscape with a garden of which Vanessa Bell became invested in reviving and became the subject of many of her paintings (Naylor 138). “The red tiled roof, generous in scale, connotes warmth and protection. A farm pond in front of the house expresses a sense of informality and ease. The face of the house is simply configured, with a symmetrical arrangement of windows and central door. Though informal, it is proportionate and ordered. Attached to the house is a brick and flint wall which encloses the garden, lying to the north” (Hancock, Charleston and Monk’s House 59).

Virginia Woolf to Vanessa Bell

Carbis Bay, Cornwall, 24 September 1916

“It is very exciting to think that you may get Charleston. I hope you will. Leonard says there are certainly 8 bedrooms, probably more, and very good ones, two big sitting rooms on the ground floor and one small one; and very good large rooms on the first floor. He says the garden could be made lovely – there are fruit trees, and vegetables, and a most charming walk under trees. The only drawbacks seemed to be that there is cold water, and no hot, in the bathroom; not a very nice w.c. and a cesspool in the tennis court… Whatever you may say, I think the country there is superb to live in – I always want to come back again, and one never feels it dull, but then, not being an artist, my feelings are not to be considered ha! ha! … Please write soon and say what happens. I’m sure, if you get Charleston, you’ll end by buying it forever. If you lived there, you could make it absolutely divine.”

In September 1916, during the First World War, Vanessa Bell moved into the Charleston home with Duncan Grant, David (Bunny) Garnett, and Grant’s dog, Henry. Charleston became a significant home to Vanessa Bell’s two sons by Clive Bell, Julian and Quentin (Hancock, Charleston and Monk’s House 7). The Bloomsbury circle spent their time traveling to the various houses that members and their friends owned. They spent their time at the Charleston house throughout the year, and together with the Bloomsbury Group, as well as other affiliations, mainly stayed there in the summer.

Bloomsbury Group and Friends, Charleston

David Garnett, The Flowers of the Forest, 1955

“…The actual move which followed was not so easy. Charleston had to be furnished and made habitable; the children, servants, and ducks had to be moved from Wissett, to say nothing of the easels, scores of canvases, boxes of paints, packing cases of books and a sack of globe artichoke suckers… At first there was an acute shortage of furniture and for some weeks Duncan and I had to sleep on the floor, owing to the lack of beds. For a long while several of the rooms remained empty and unused. Then some furniture was brought down from 46 Gordon Square, other pieces were bought in Lewes and these with rare exceptions were astounding objects, bargains which attracted Duncan or Vanessa because of their strange shapes and low prices… Both Duncan and Vanessa appeared to believe that the inherent horror of any badly designed and constructed pieces of furniture could be banished forever by decoration. The strange blend of hideous objects of furniture, pained with delightful works of art, gives to the rooms at Charleston a character which is unique and astonishing…” (Naylor 141).

Angelica Bell’s Birth

On Christmas Day 1918, Vanessa Bell gave birth to her daughter by Duncan Grant, Angelica, at the Charleston home. David Garnett (Bunny) wrote about the event in his letter to Constance Garnett with interesting detail of the Bloomsbury members present:

“Dearest Mother, Vanessa had a daughter born at 2 a.m. this morning, so I am very glad I was here. It is a queer little creature, very lonely and full of independent life. I went for the doctor about nine and sat up till it was over and then was able to have a look at it. It weighed seven and a half pounds, being put in a cardboard box on the kitchen scales. Clive is very glad it is a girl; so will Virginia be for she thinks highly of her own sex. Vanessa doesn’t and is probably rather disappointed. It is a curious emotional experience waiting for someone else’s child to be born” (Naylor 147).

Virginia Woolf wrote to Violet Dickinson about her meeting her new niece for the first time, and describes the Charleston Farmhouse in its progress:

“…I saw my new niece, Angelica, the other day; very lovely with vast blue eyes, and long fingers. Nessa presides over the most astonishing menage; Belgian hares, governesses, children, gardens, hens, ducks, and paiting all the time, till every inch of the house is a different colour…” (Naylor 147).

Artists and Writers: Works Completed

Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant spent the majority of their time painting and using their artistic ability to decorate the home. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant designed the interior of the house “to create the impression of stepping inside the frame of a painting – an immersion into a three-dimensional Post-Impressionist world” (Hancock, Charleston and Monk’s House 62). Clive Bell worked on The New Renaissance during his visits. Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace was written at Charleston and published in 1919. Roger Fry helped design and build the studio, as well as create the garden with Bell.

David Garnett, The Flowers of the Forest, 1955

“…Charleston was at first a rambling old farmhouse, full of badly planned passages and small rooms. There was, on the garden side, a long cool dairy room with solid slate slabs round the walls to set the shallow pans of milk for creaming; on the way to it was a pantry and another larder or a stillroom with a slatted door. Slowly the house took on another, but equally living character. One after another, the rooms were decorated and altered almost out of recognition as the bodies of the saved are said to be glorified after the resurrection. Duncan painted many of the doors with pictures on the panels and with decorative borders round the frames. In every leisure moment he was at work… Duncan, like a sailor was always quietly occupied with some task of his own investment. ‘Creative activity was his passion; he was never satisfied with what he had ready-made; he longed to make something new.’ Those words written of Tchehov were equally true of Duncan… In his schemes Duncan was always seconded by Vanessa; they painted together in harmony, perfectly happy while they were at work and rarely resting from it. Thus Charleston was transformed” (Naylor 144).

Studio Space by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Charleston

Virginia wrote in her diary during her stay at Charleston and captures the essence of the home as well as those who resided in it:

Virginia Woolf’s diary

Friday, 2 November 1917

“…Yesterday it rained all day, so I sat in: writing about Aksakoff in the morning; sitting in the Studio after luncheon. Duncan painted a table, and Nessa copied a Giotto… They are very large in effect, these painters; very little self-conscious; they have smooth broad spaces in their minds where I am all prickles and promontories. Nevertheless to my thinking few people have a more vigorous grasp or a more direct pounce than Nessa. Two little boys with very attractive minds keep her in exercise. I like the feeling that she gives of a whole nature in use. In working order I mean; living practically, not an amateur, as Duncan and Bunny [David Garnett] both to some extent are of course. I suppose this is the effect of children and of responsibility, but always remember it in her…” (Naylor 142).

Years later, Woolf records another stay at the Charleston home, illustrating every detail in how Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and others operated within the house as artists. While this chapter of her diary contrasts in tone from the previous of 1917, Woolf suggests that these artists differed from the writers of the Bloomsbury Group and invested the majority of their time to their artistic vocations.

Virginia Woolf’s Diary

Monday 6 August 1923

“We went over to Charleston yesterday. Although thinking quite well of ourselves, we were not well recieved by the painters. There sat like assiduous children at task in a bedroom – Roger, Nessa, & Duncan; Roger on chair in foreground; Nessa on sofa, Duncan on bed. In front of them was one jar of flowers, & one arrangement of still life. Roger was picking out his blue flower very brightly. For some reason, the talk was not entirely congenial. I suspect myself of pertness and so on. Clive was sitting in the drawing room window reading Dryden… Charleston is as usual. One hears Clive shouting in the garden before one arrives. Nessa emerges from a great variegated quilt of asters and artichokes; not very cordial; a little absent-minded. Clive bursts out of his shirt; sits square in his chair and bubbles. Then Duncan drifts in, also vague, absent-minded, and incredibly wrapped round with yellow waistcoats, spotted ties, and old blue stained painting jackets. His trousers have to be hitched up constantly. He rumples his hair. However, I can’t help thinking that we grow in cordiality, instead of drifting out of sight. And why not stand on one’s own leg, and defy them, even in the matter of hats and chaircovers? Surely at the age of forty… As for Duncan he requires, I think, peace for painting. He would like it all settled one way or the other. We saw a perfectly black rabbit, and a perfectly black cat, sitting on the road, with its tail out like a strap. ‘What they call an example of melanism’ said Clive – which amused me very much, and also made me like him…” (Naylor 152).

The Charleston Garden

Vanessa Bell’s approach to garden-making became a subject of a painter’s interpretation. She collaborated with Duncan Grant and mostly Roger Fry, “the overall design of the garden was conceived in collaboration with him [Fry] after the war” (Hancock, “Virginia Woolf and Gardens” 253). The garden became a studio en plein air [an inspirational context for study and observation] and a constant source of still lives and garden views for Grant and Bell. Bell’s daughter remembers that her mother had no need to go further than the garden to find the perfect motif; she could be seen hovering peaceably in front of her easel, her dress protected by a flimsy French apron, her feet in flat-heeled espadrilles, and on her head a broad-brimmed hat to shade her eyes from the glare. Her presence was betrayed by a smell of oil and turpentine. Cut flowers were brought from without to within, to decorate the house, as paintings verify, and as subjects for painting” (Hancock, Charleston and Monk’s House 99).

Bell wrote to her son, Julian, detailing the progress of the garden “from the promise of spring to full summer flowering.” In June, she wrote, “the garden is an overwhelming blaze of colour . . . pinks out in masses, roses. . . . By August, it is ‘a mass of flowers & as gay as possible . . . tobaccos & stocks smell strong in the evening. I often wander about in it at odd moments for the pleasure of the sights and smells.” A few weeks later, on a late summer day, Bell writes to Julian describing the atmosphere of the Charleston, “The house seems full of young people in very high spirits, laughing a great deal at their own jokes . . . lying about in the garden which is simply a dithering blaze of flowers and butterflies and apples” (Hancock, Charleston and Monk’s House 98).

Duncan Grant and Angelica Bell in the garden, Charleston

The End of the Bloomsbury Group: Charleston Lives on

Duncan Grant lived at Charleston with Vanessa until she died in 1961, and continued to live there until his own death in 1978 (Hancock, Charleston and Monk’s House 7).
The Charleston Farmhouse opened in 1986, twenty-five years after the death of Vanessa Bell, under the custodianship of the Charleston Trust. The home is now a Museum, where people can tour the Bloomsbury home with offered tour guides to experience the history of the artist and writers who lived and stayed there. Charleston continues “to be a gathering place for artistic and literary pursuits, with two literary festivals each year and numerous related talks and events. Woolf and Bell’s intimate inhabitations are now cultural ‘theatres of memory” (Hancock, Charleston and Monk’s House 29).

Works Cited

Gillian Naylor, Bloomsbury: Its Artists, Authors and Designers, Little Brown, 1990.

Hancock, Nuala. “Virginia Woolf and Gardens.” The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, edited by Maggie Humm, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2010, pp. 245–260. JSTOR, “http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g0b0wh.19”>www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g0b0wh.19. Accessed 27 Apr. 2018.

Hancock, Nuala. Charleston and Monk’s House: The Intimate House Museums of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, Edinburgh University Press, 2012. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt3fgrqp. Accessed 20 Apr. 2018.

Richard Shone, The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Princeton
UP, 1999.

Garsington Manor

Mary K Evans Bloomsbury Group, Locations, Oxford May 2, 2018May 3, 2018 0 Comment

Introduction

Garsington Manor was one of the central meeting places for those artists, writers, and other members of Modernist society that were not necessarily part of the Bloomsbury Group, although several members of the Bloomsbury Group did stay at Garsington. Lady Ottoline Morrell established Garsington as the premiere meeting place for creative minds that were not members of the Bloomsbury Group. D.H. Lawrence and Frieda, Aldous Huxley, Philip Heseltine, Bertrand Russell, Clive Bell, T.S. Eliot, Siegfried Sassoon, Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Bell, Virgina Woolf, and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garsington_Manor#/media/File:Garsington_Manor_By_Henry_Taunt.jpg — Garsington Manon Taken by Henry Taunt in 1865.

Roger Fry visited Garsington at various gatherings and parties hosted by Lady Ottoline.

History of Garsington

Garsington Manor was built in approximately the 16th century on the grounds of what was Abingdon Abbey (“Garsington Manor” Historial England). The property allegedly belonged to the son of Geoffrey Chaucer, and at one time was called “Chaucers,” before it bore the name “Garsington Manor” (“Garsington Manor” Wikipedia). The manor home fell into disrepair and was used as a farmhouse until Philip Morrell, Lady Ottoline’s Husband, purchased the property in 1913, and he spent two years rebuilding the manor house before he invited his wife to join him (Darroch 157). The manor house was designed by Philip Tilden (“Garsington Manor” Historic England).

Lady Ottoline Arrives at Garsington

Lady Ottoline travels from Buxton to Garsington Manor on May 17, 1915 (Darroch 157). She was anxious and apprehensive about moving in and living at Garsington. Sarah Jobson Darroch, in Ottoline: The Life of Lady Ottoline Morrell, describes the appearance of Garsington as Lady Ottoline arrived:

Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1902 Courtesy of: Wikipedia

The high gabled manor, two storeys plus attics, was built of grey Cotswold stone with mullioned windows and surrounded by 20 acres of garden and farmland. Double wrought-iron gates opened straight off the road into a small gravelled courtyard leading to the front door; but the real front of the house was around the other side, overlooking the Berkshire Downs. There was a large garden sloped away through a group of ponds to an orchard, beyond which were open fields and an unobstructed view to Wittenham Clumps. It was one of the most beautiful houses in Oxfordshire, built originally, it was said, for some monastic order; it was also said that the ponds were mentioned in the Doomsday Book.” (Darroch 157)

Lady Ottoline defied tradition in many of her design choices in the house, particularly the two large drawing rooms on the ground floor of the house, where she chose to “paint one a vivid Venetian red, and the other a sea-green” (Darroch 158), making the choice to ignore the oak panelling as part of her design decisions.

However, the centerpiece of the property during Lady Ottoline’s time at Garsington was the grounds, which she intended to look like an Italian Garden, which Darroch describes:

Ottoline had the biggest of the ponds enlarged into a small, rectangular lake round which hedges were planted. Classical statues lined its perimeter and a larger statue was erected on an artificial island in the centre. When the hedges grew Gothic arches were cut through so people swimming or punting ot strolling could look out and see the blossoming trees in the orchard beyond. Into this arcadian setting, Ottoline, with a final flourish, introduced some peacocks to strut and preen.” (158)

Allegedly, the gardens were inspired in part by Lady Ottoline’s aunt, Mrs. Henry Scott, who lived at the Villa Capponi, near Florence, “and was probably laid out by Lady Ottoline Herself” (“Garsington Manor” Historic England).

June 16, 1915 was the first party she hosted at Garsington, “a housewarming to coincide with her forty-second birthday” (Darroch 159). D.H. Lawrence and Frieda and Bertrand Russell were among the first guests to visit Garsington, after much begging on his part.

by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 29 November 1915

Lawrence and Garsington

For D. H. Lawrence, Garsington Manor was a refuge, but also a location of critique. He was a frequent visitor to Garsington, and “on one visit he helped Ottoline plant iris bulbs around the pond. He also built a small summerhouse for the garden,” (Darroch 164). Garsington could be the location for the Utopian society he wanted to build (Darroch 159).

Lawrence wrote a prose poem about Garsington Manor, which he sent to Lady Ottoline:

Shafted, looped windows between the without and within, the old house, the perfect old intervention of fitted stone, fitted perfectly about a silent soul, the soul that in drowning under this last wave of time looks out clear through the shafted windows to see the dawn of all dawns taking place, the England of all recollection rousing into being… It is me, generations and generations me, every complex, gleaming fibre of me, every lucis panf of my coming into being, And oh, my God, I cannot bear it. For it is not this me who am drowning under this last wave of time, this bursten flood.” (qtd. in Worthen 165)

As Lawrence and Bertrand Russell struck up an interest in philosophy together, and they planned some lectures, and he wanted to return to Garsington, seeing it as a philosophical refuge. In a letter to Lady Ottoline, he wrote.

We must have some meetings at Garsington. Garsington must be the retreat where we come together and knit ourselves together. Garsington is wonderful for that. It is like the Boccaccio place where they told all the Decameron. That wonderful lawn, under the ilex trees, with the old house and its exquisite old front– it is so remote, so perfectly a small world to itself, where one can get away from the temporal things to consider the big things.” (qtd. in Morrell 62).

Parties at Garsington

Garsington Manor served as the site for many large parties hosted by Lady Ottoline. Christmas 1915 was her biggest party since she moved in in 1915, as Darroch describes:

She [Ottoline] invited her biggest party yet, and almost every bedroom was full. There was Clive Bell, Lytton, Keynes, the philosopher George Santayana, Middleton Murry, Lord Henry Bentinck, Vanessa Bell and two of her Children, plus Marjorie and James Strachey. Ottoline was determined to make this Christmas the brightest and best ever and the entertainments uncluded games of backgammon, a charade entitled Life and Death of Lytton, and a large tree hung with gifts. The crowning event was a party in the large barn for the villagers and their children.” (Darroch 166)

Lady Ottoline also hosted a party at Easter, and she invited Roger Fry, key member of the Bloomsbury set. He allegedly enjoyed himself during his stay at Garsington (Darroch 173). According to Darroch, “At Easter, life at Garsington began to quicken– so much so that the house

Some members of the Bloomsbury group at Garsington.

that summer seemed at times more like a popular guesthouse than a private home” (Darroch 173).

Many of the Garsington parties featured entertainment that “took the form of elaborate charades and dancing, using her [Lady Ottoline’s] collection of exotic materials to dress up” (Kincaid-Weekes qtd. in Norris 190). When Lawrence attended parties at Garsington, “In the evenings at Garsington Lawrence read poetry by the fire and told stories about his early life. Once he decided they would all act in a version of Othello he adapted for the occasion” (Darroch 164).

Garsington During the War

During World War I, Garsington Manor served as a

haven for those politically opposed to the war. Lady Ottoline Morrell, in her memoirs, wrote about the purpose she wanted Garsington to have during the war:

Philip and I were hoping to make a centre at Garsington for those who were still under control of reason, who saw the War as it really was, not through false emotional madness, and the intoxication of war fever. We hoped that they would at least mean and think and talk freely, and realize that there were other values in life.” (84).

Siegfried Sassoon, upon being invalided home from the front, was brought to Garsington, where he enjoyed himself immensely, returning in 1918 (Seymour). Sassoon wrote about his experience there in 1915:

Here I sat, in this perfect bedroom with its old mullioned windows looking across the green forecourt… Garsington was just about the pleasantest house house I had ever stayed in– so pleasant that it wouldn’t be safe to think about it when I was back at the front.” (qtd. in Seymour)

Lady Ottoline notes that “with the exception of Lytton, most of them [those staying at Garsington during the war] were all young, full of vitality and indignation against the war” (49). Many of the Bloomsbury Group, like Clive Bell, were invited, and stayed at Garsington, farming the land during the course of the war (“Garsington Manor, Oxfordshire, England”). Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, and David “Bunny” Garnett were among the famous pacifist faces that stayed at Garsington periodically throughout the war period (Morrell 50-52).

By 1916, Garsington Manor was a safe haven for those who wanted to avoid prosecution for being conscientious objectors (“Garsington Manor, Oxfordshire, England”). Lady Ottoline Morrell describes a situation where a journalist attempted to write a story about the conscientious objectors:

the other Conscientious Objectors were naturally unpopular in the village and it was hard work to protect them… Then there was a visit from a representative of the Daily Sketch or Daily Mirror, who intended to write an article exposing these ‘slackers’ and ‘bogus’ farm workers. Philip had to placate him and show him that it was a genuine farm and that the men did genuine work, and indeed by threatening a libel action if he wrote about it.” (Morrell 126)

Lady Ottoline praised Philip greatly for his handling of the conscientious objectors, noting that he even looked into the views of people interested in coming to Garsington, to ensure that they were really Conscientious Objectors (Morrell 127).

Garsington’s Impact on Literature

D.H. Lawrence was inspired by Garsington Manor, and it influenced the party scenes in Women in Love, according to Margot Norris. Aldous Huxley allegedly made Garsington the setting for Chrome Yellow (1921) (“Garsington Manor” Historic England).

Garsington Manor Beyond the Modernists

In 1928, Garsington Manor was sold to Dr. Heaton of Christ Church, Oxford (“Garsington Manor” Historic England). Garsington was sold again in 1954 to the brother of Mrs. Heaton, Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, founder of St. Anthony College at Oxford. In 1981, it was sold to Leonard Ingrams and his wife.

Leonard Ingrams and his wife Rosalind founded the Garsington Opera in 1989. In 2011, the Garsington opera was moved to Wormsley Estate when Leonard Ingrams passed away (“History”).

Garsington in Lady Ottoline’s Own Words

In her memoirs, Lady Ottoline wrote the following description of Garsington Manor:

Sometimes I felt as if Garsington was a theatre, where week after week a travelling company would arrive and play their parts. The old grey Jacobean house with magnolia and roses climbing on it stood like a square casket, enamelled inside with reds and greed and greys and gold. On the one side of the forecourt enclosed by stone gates and dark walls of yew, as high as the house. On the other the garden with cypresses and a great ilex tree and the formal flower garden like a coloured, sweet-smelling carpet. And below the terraces, the monastic fish ponds, surrounded by Italian statues standing against yew hedges, and green paths where the peacocks trailed their long tails, or unfolded them with amorous vibratings.
It was indeed a ravishing decor, recalling to one a Watteau or a Fragonard, a Mozart opera, and Italian villa, a Shakespeare play or any of the lovely worlds that poetic art has created. But the company that entered each week-end were a queer, strange, rather ragged company. How much they felt and saw of the beauty of the setting I never knew. Not very much perhaps, because there are few who are sensitive to beauty until it is established and written about…
Certainly it was a romantic theatre where week after week a new company would arrive, unpack, shake out their frills and improvise a new scene in life. For three days the play would last. Philip and I raised the curtain, Fate prompted the players, and the new players came and went and came again. When they arrived they left behind them work and conventions and their commonplace surroundings and entered a strange new region, where fresh influences made them often oblivious of the ordinary world and perhaps stimulated them to give vent to hidden impulses.” (Morrell 255-256).

Works Cited

Darroch, Sandra Jobson. Ottoline: The Life of Lady Ottoline Morrell.Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, Inc., 1975.

“Garsington Manor.” Historic England. Historic England, 1987. https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1001095. Accessed 1 May 2018.

“Garsington Manor.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Project, 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garsington_Manor. Accessed 1 May 2018.

“Garsington Manor, Oxfordshire, England” Geni, Geni.com, n.d. https://www.geni.com/projects/Garsington-Manor-Oxfordshire-England/25409. Accessed 2 May 2018.

“History.” Garsington Opera, Olamalu, n.d. http://www.garsingtonopera.org/gallery/history. Accessed 1 May 2018.

Morrell, Lady Ottoline. Ottoline at Garsington: Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell 1915-1918, edited by Robert Gathorne-Hardy. Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.

Norris, Margot. “The Party In Extremis in D.R. Lawrence’s Women in Love.” The Modernist Party, edited by Kate McLoughlin, Edinburgh Press, 2013, pp. 178-191.

Seymour, Miranda. “Why Garsington Manor was Britain’s Most Scandalous Wartime Retreat.” The Guardian, The Guardian News and Media Limited, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/25/why-garsington-manor-britains-scandalous-retreat. Accessed 2 May 2018.

Worthen, John. D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider. Counterpoint, 2005.

The Omega Workshops

Martha Carpentier Bloomsbury Group, London July 10, 2017November 28, 2017 0 Comment

The Omega Workshops Ltd. was founded by members of the Bloomsbury Group, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant in July 1913 “with the intention of providing graphic expression to the essence of the Bloomsbury ethos.” Fry believed that artists could design, produce, and sell their own decorated crafts and household items to earn additional income. In addition to offering a wide range of individual products, such as painted furniture, painted murals, mosaics, stained glass, and textiles, Omega Workshops offered interior design themes for various living spaces. A commission was given to the Omega to decorate a room for the 1913 Ideal Home Exhibition, and an illustrated catalogue, including text written by Fry, was published in autumn 1914.

The artist, novelist, and close friend of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis was initially part of the operation. Lewis, however, split off at an early stage, taking with him several other participants to start the rival decorative workshop Rebel Art Centre after accusing Fry of misappropriating the commission for the Ideal Home Exhibition. In October 1913, Wyndham Lewis, Frederick Etchells, Edward Wadsworth, and Cuthbert Hamilton announced their resignation from Omega in a letter to its shareholders and patrons, which contained accusations particularly against Fry, criticizing the workshop’s products and ideology.

In the autumn of 1913 Fry started designing and making pottery. . . . The range of products continued to increase throughout Omega Workshops’ six-year existence, and in April 1915 Vanessa Bell began using Omega fabrics in dress design, after which dressmaking became a successful part of the business.

Omega closed in 1919, after a clearance sale, and was officially liquidated on 24 July 1920. A series of poor financial decisions and internal conflicts all contributed to its decline. At the time of its closure, Fry was the only remaining original member working regularly at the workshop. Despite this, Omega became influential in interior design in the 1920s.

— “Omega Workshops.” Wikipedia, 25 June 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Workshops. Accessed 28 June 2017.

“Founded by Roger Fry, the Omega Workshops opened to the public in 1913, bringing the abstract forms and bold colours of modern art into the designs for furniture, textiles and other household accessories . . . Fry was not concerned with social reform or protesting against contemporary machine manufacture, but wanted to remove what he saw as the false division between the fine and decorative arts. He wanted to see some of the main ideas of post-impressionism, such as bright colours and bold, simplified forms, applied to design. . . . Fry also wanted to help his artist friends by providing them with the chance to make a living designing and decorating furniture, textiles and other household accessories, alongside their artistic careers. Fry felt that objects and furniture should be bought and valued for their beauty rather than because of the reputation of the artist, so he insisted that all work be produced anonymously. Designs were unsigned and marked only with the symbol Ω, the Greek letter Omega. Omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet, and in the late nineteenth century it was used to mean the ‘last word’ on a subject.

“Despite Roger Fry’s best efforts, Omega struggled to survive financially and closed in 1919 just six years after it opened its doors. In June 1919 Fry wrote in a letter to his friend and supporter Michael Saddler: ‘The utter indifference…of the public to what we have attempted has bought Omega to disaster’. A combination of inefficient techniques, expensive materials, and a lack of orders, as well as internal wranglings forced Omega to close in 1919. . . . By this time Fry was the only original member still working regularly at Fitzroy Square as Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were now living at Charleston, and many of the other artists had moved on. In the letter he wrote to Sir Michael Saddler in 1919 he revealed just how much the Workshops had cost him financially:

I kept it alive by doles out of my own pocket during the war believing that some kind of revival might take place when it was over. Now I have come to the end of my tether. I have lost £2000 and five years of gratuitous hard work & I can’t waste more on a country that regards the attempt to create as a kind of Bolshevism. Anyhow art in England must get on as best it can without me…”— “Omega Workshops.” Tate, n.d., http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/bloomsbury-group/omega-workshops. Accessed 28 June 2017.

“The Omega Workshops Ltd opened to the public in July 1913, its showrooms and studios in a house at 33 Fitzroy Square. Fry was its driving force and director; Grant and Bell were shareholding co-directors. Along with these three, the artists principally identified with the opening displays of furniture, wall decorations and textiles were Wyndham Lewis, Frederick and Jessie Etchells, Edward Wadsworth, Henri Doucet . . . Paul Nash, Nina Hamnett and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. All works were sold anonymously, designs for future items were centrally pooled and artists were paid so much per day (usually seven shillings and sixpence). There was a business manager, accountant, caretaker and a changing cast of assistants in the salesroom and studios. Outside craftsmen and manufacturers were employed for printed fabrics, carpets, furniture and, later, pottery. Whole interiors were undertaken and Omega wares were prominent in various fine and applied art exhibitions in London. There was good press coverage, most of it favourable, and eventually the Omega sold work abroad. During the war, concerts, lectures and ‘evenings’ were organized, as well as theatrical performances, and its activities included one-artist shows . . . [such as] Vanessa Bell’s first solo exhibition (1916). . .” (137).

“The years 1913-14 saw the Omega at its most innovative: outstanding are its abstract fabrics and carpets, simple unadorned furniture and pottery that was distinctly ahead of its time in Britain. An artist’s personal spontaneity of expression formed the keynote within the homogeneous sensibility of the Omega style; good craftsmanship, at least in the early days, was encouraged; professionalism went hand in hand with informality; it was revolutionary yet amenable. . . . After the outbreak of war in 1914 it became increasingly difficult to attract new artists, sales and commissions fluctuated and Fry’s stalwart collaborators, Bell and Grant, were in rural retreat [at Charleston, in Grant’s case, doing agricultural work in lieu of conscription]. . . . By 1919 Fry was eager to concentrate on his own painting and writing and the Omega was losing money; in June-July that year a clearance sale was held and the company went into voluntary liquidation a year later” (138).

— Shone, Richard. The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Princeton UP, 1999.

“A plan was sketched in talk. A company was to be formed; a workshop was to be started. The young artists were to make chairs and tables, carpets and pots that people liked to look at; that they liked to make. Thus they were to earn a living; thus they would be free to paint pictures, as poets wrote poetry, for pleasure not for money. Thus they would assert the freedom of art ‘from all trammels and tyrannies’. . . . He knew by this time the drudgery and the difficulty of putting such schemes into execution. He had first-hand knowledge both of artists and business men and of the abuse that is the reward of one who tries to bring them together. But – ‘all the people in this new movement are alive and whatever they do has life’” (189).

“In July 1913 the Omega workshops in Fitzroy Square were opened. . . . The house in which Roger Fry set up his workshop is there to-day – a house with a past of its own, a Georgian past, a Victorian past. . . . But now the Georgian and the Victorian ghosts were routed. Two Post-Impressionist Titans were mounted over the doorway; and inside everything was bustle and confusion. There were bright chintzes designed by the young artists; there were painted tables and painted chairs; and there was Roger Fry himself escorting now Lady So-and-so, now a business man from Birmingham, round the rooms and doing his best to persuade them to buy” (190).

“It was, as he said ‘very exciting’. The public was eager to buy; and the artists were eager to work. He was surprised by the excellence of their work. ‘The artists have a tremendous lot of invention and a new feeling for colour and proportion that astonish me’, he told Lowes Dickinson. ‘My fearful problem is that to harness the forces I’ve got and to get the best out of them practically and it’s the deuce to do.’ The truth of that last statement was soon to be proved” (191). [Here Woolf quotes from a circular and the letter sent by Wyndham Lewis and the others accusing Fry and withdrawing from the Omega.]

“But he had much more important matters to attend to than storms in tea-cups. The ‘fearful problem’ presented by the Omega was very real. It showed signs of immediately becoming a great success. Orders were coming in. The public was amused and interested. The papers devoted a great deal of space to the new venture. Interviewers were sent to Fitzroy Square, and one of them has recorded his impressions of the Omega in those early days. Mr Fry, he says, took him around and he asked Mr Fry to explain his intentions. ‘It is time’, said Mr Fry, ‘that the spirit of fun was introduced into furniture and into fabrics. We have suffered too long from the dull and the stupidly serious.’ He took up a wool work cushion. ‘What do you think that represents?’ said Mr Fry. ‘A landscape?’ the interviewer hazarded. Mr Fry laughed. ‘It is a cat lying on a cabbage playing with a butterfly’, he said. . . . The interviewer looked at last saw the butterfly though he failed to see the cat. Then Mr Fry showed him a chair. He said it was ‘a conversational chair’, a witty chair; . . . its legs were bright-blue and yellow, and brilliant bands of intense blue and green were worked around a black seat.” Certainly it was much more amusing than an ordinary chair. . . . Then he brought out a screen upon which there was a picture of a circus. The interviewer was puzzled by the long waists, bulging necks and short legs of the figures. ‘But how much wit there is in those figures’, said Mr Fry. ‘Art is significant deformity.’ The interviewer was interested. Upstairs they went to the great white work-room, where one artists was at work upon a ceiling, another was painting what appeared to be ‘a very large raccoon with very flexible joints’ for the walls of a nursery. Then down again to the show-room where the journalist was made to look at chintzes, cushions, lamp-shades, garden tables and also ‘a radiantly coloured dress of gossamery silk’ designed by a French artist. Mr Fry was tackling the subject of women’s dress. . . . It was very beautiful, the interviewer agreed, but would English women ever have the courage to wear it? ‘Oh,’ said Mr Fry, ‘people will have to be educated . . .’ So at last the interviewer took himself off, prophesying that posterity would hold the Omega in honour because ‘it had brought beauty and careful workmanship into the common things of life’” (195).

“The Omega too had survived the war, but in a badly crippled condition. A fresh spurt of business came, or course, with the peace; but then three of the staff went down with influenza; the auditors complained of the unbusinesslike book-keeping, and Roger Fry had to pay certain debts out of his own pocket. At last, when it came to selling two chairs for four pounds ‘after being abject the whole afternoon’, the struggle seemed no longer worth the effort. By March 1919 he determined to make an end of it; and in June of that year he presided over a sale of the goods at the Omega workshops (216) . . . So the Omega workshops closed down. The shades of the Post-Impressionists have gone to join the other shades; no trace of them is now to be seen in Fitzroy Square . . . and the rooms have other occupants. But some of the things he made still remain – a painted table; a witty chair; a dinner service; a bowl or two of that turquoise blue the man from the British Museum so much admired. And if by chance one of those broad deep plates is broken, or an accident befalls a blue dish, all the shops in London may be searched in vain for its fellow” (218).

— Woolf, Virginia. Roger Fry, A Biography. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1940.