17 February 2007

The Bloomsbury Group

This is a short but very charming book. It explores the impact of Bloomsbury personalities on each other, as well as how they shaped the development of British modernism. But most of all it is a delightful collection of portrait paintings and photographs, with accompanying biographical notes. It's an introductory essay which outlines the development of Bloomsbury, followed by a series of portraits and the biographical sketches of the major figures. The paintings are supplemented by some quite rare photographs - most of which I suspect came from the National Portrait Gallery for which this publication was once an exhibition catalogue. The characters portrayed are what might be called the usual suspects: Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Ottoline Morrell, John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and Dora Carrington, for instance... Read more >>


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