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Sometimes, an artist has to wait a lifetime to get the recognition he or she deserves. Sometimes two lifetimes, if that artist happens to be female. Perhaps even longer if she has made her way in life surrounded by famous, and very vociferous and opinionated others, as was the case for the modern artist Vanessa Bell (1879–1961), wife of the art critic Clive Bell, sister of Virginia Woolf and sometime lover of the scholar Roger Fry and the artist Duncan Grant. But when one stands in a gallery of Bell’s paintings, as one can this winter and spring at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, Bell’s talent comes out to shine all on its own at last, with pictures assembled from both sides of the Atlantic in a resounding display of force. Today we can enjoy a privilege that Bell never enjoyed in her own lifetime: basking in the full radiance of her vision in a full-scale museum exhibition devoted just to her. And what a fi erce talent she turns out to be. Focusing on Bell’s period of greatest experimentation, before and during WW1, our exhibition Vanessa Bell delivers a sense of the artist at her most daring and experimental, with objects ranging from paintings and works on paper to fabric designs, ceramics and photography. While she may have devoted much energy to running her famously bohemian household and raising her three children, her eye never slept. Art informed life and vice versa, with the constant fl ow of friends, relatives, professional colleagues and children (Bell’s and others) constantly cross-pollinating. Rather than being a place of conformity and constraint, domestic space was reimagined as a place of freedom and industrious creative pursuit. Born to an accomplished literary family – her father was the biographer Sir Leslie Stephen – Bell grew up in Hyde Park Gate under the eye of her famously beautiful mother Julia Stephen, née Jackson, a woman who was painted by the pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones and photographed by her pioneering aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron. Bell thus came from a line that included both muse and artist, but she defi nitively chose the latter role for herself, despite the sometimes idealising likenesses made of her by her fellow artists. Bell’s matrilineal connection to Cameron was important to her, giving her a kind of permission, and she often emulated Cameron’s costumed portraiture in her own photographs and paintings. Bell’s move with her three younger siblings to Gordon Square, following the death of her father in 1904, was a bold one. Bloomsbury was considered a very unconventional roosting place Images: Private Collection, © The Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy of Henrietta Garnett. Photo credit: Photography by Matthew Hollow; Swindon Museum and Art Gallery. © The Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy of Henrietta Garnett; Tate: Purchased 1976. © The Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy of Henrietta Garnett. Photo credit: © Tate, London 2016.VANESSA BELL www.nadfas.org.uk NADFAS REVIEW / SPRING 2017 29