Vanessa Bell (1879-1961)

Vanessa Stephen was the eldest daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Jackson (1846–1895). Her parents lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Westminster, London, and Vanessa lived there until 1904. She was educated at home by her parents in languages, mathematics and history, and took drawing lessons from Ebenezer Cook before she attended Sir Arthur Cope's art school in 1896, and then studied painting at the Royal Academy in 1901.During her childhood, Stephen and her sister Virginia were sexually molested by their half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth.After the deaths of her mother in 1895 and her father in 1904, Vanessa sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and moved to Bloomsbury with Virginia and brothers Thoby (1880–1906) and Adrian (1883–1948), where they met and began socialising with the artists, writers and intellectuals who would come to form the Bloomsbury Group.She married Clive Bell in 1907 and they had two sons, Julian (who die