Vanessa Bell:
Portrait of a Girl in Profile, with a Decorated Background
Framed (ref: 11134)

Gouache 

Tags: Vanessa Bell gouache design women

Provenance: Folio Fine Art London, Ltd.; Charles Craig, Jr., Santa Barbara, acquired from the above, 1967; By descent to Craig Hendrix, South Carolina; Gift to Sandra Christians-Miller, Santa Barbara; Private collection

Exhibited: Folio Fine Art, "Vanessa Bell Drawings and Designs," 1967; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, British Painting, 1982 1/19--8/14 1982, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Diverse Directions, 1988 12/12/87--2/7/88

Literature: Llewellyn, Sacha, et al. Women Only Works on Paper. Liss Llewellyn, 2021, p. 43.

This work was described as a design for a ceramic tile when it was first exhibited at the Folio Fine Art Ltd., London, in 1967. It was likely produced for the potter, Phyllis Keyes, whom Vanessa Bell met in 1931. Keyes had a workshop in Warren Street, and supplied Bell and Duncan Grant with a variety of tiles, pots, jugs and vases, either thrown by her or cast from designs that the artists provided. These ceramics then often featured in decorative schemes completed by the Bloomsbury artists.

The simplicity of this tile design reduces the artist’s style almost to its essence. Robert Travers observes that while Bell’s oil paintings after the end of the First World War ‘became increasingly built-up, saturated and developed, her decorative work inherited the freedom of line, colour and abstract composition which she pursued so fruitfully between 1910 and 1918’.