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‘If Paradise was a garden then the garden at Charleston may well be its Platonic shadow.’


- Virginia Nicholson (Granddaughter of Vanessa Bell)[1]

Critic, artist, and tastemaker Roger Fry was instrumental in the success of Charleston Farmhouse as a home and studio to artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Fry helped design the studio at Charleston and redesigned the walled garden, depicted here, with a rectangular lawn, gravel paths around a pool and flowerbeds filled with blooms.

'At Charleston, his imprint is everywhere … Charleston wouldn't be Charleston without Roger Fry.’[2]

In 1910, ten years before this painting was completed, Fry had whipped up a furore when he staged Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries. It included vividly coloured modern works by artists such as Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne and attracted over 25,000 visitors over two months. The exhibition challenged established artistic traditions of form and beauty and at the same...


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‘If Paradise was a garden then the garden at Charleston may well be its Platonic shadow.’


- Virginia Nicholson (Granddaughter of Vanessa Bell)[1]

Critic, artist, and tastemaker Roger Fry was instrumental in the success of Charleston Farmhouse as a home and studio to artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Fry helped design the studio at Charleston and redesigned the walled garden, depicted here, with a rectangular lawn, gravel paths around a pool and flowerbeds filled with blooms.

'At Charleston, his imprint is everywhere … Charleston wouldn't be Charleston without Roger Fry.’[2]

In 1910, ten years before this painting was completed, Fry had whipped up a furore when he staged Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries. It included vividly coloured modern works by artists such as Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne and attracted over 25,000 visitors over two months. The exhibition challenged established artistic traditions of form and beauty and at the same time enthused a younger generation of artists, including Bell and Grant, by offering them a new and exciting route of artistic expression to explore.

Fry’s practical mind and hands-on approach helped turn the tired farmhouse into a home and renovation of the garden was crucial to this transformation. Fry began his designs during the First World War and set about actualising them in 1918. The timing of this venture instilled a poignancy in the project. According to the National Trust, ‘Food was in short supply during the First World War and by 1917 Britain was running out of produce. Growing vegetables was actively encouraged; even the flowerbeds at Buckingham Palace were given over to food production.’[3] The freedom and luxury to grow vibrant beds of colourful flowers after a period of harsh limitation must have been paradisiacal.

Fry heeds this newfound freedom through his high vantage point, which captures the garden in the foreground and rolling landscape beyond. Merging the domestic garden with the landscape through his post-impressionistic brushstrokes, Fry generates a sense of continuity between the individual and collective, a mindset that was particularly prevalent throughout the war.

The wartime attitude of repairing and reusing pervaded the Bloomsbury artistic psyche. Fry, Grant and Bell seemed to have painted almost anything they could put their brush too. On the reverse of this landscape is a fragment of a larger work painted around 1911 with the inscription ‘Roger’s portrait of Nessa’. It is not possible to ascertain for certain whether this was originally, as implied by the inscription, a work by Roger’s hand or if, as suggested by the eminent Bloomsbury scholar Richard Shone, a work by Bell. Regardless, it is a fascinating record of the sharing of materials at Charleston and of the close lifelong friendship between Fry and Bell.

[1] Nicholson, V., (1997) Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden. London: Frances Lincoln, p. 163.

[2] Nicholson, V., (1997) Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden. London: Frances Lincoln, p. 18.

[3] (2017) A Plantsman's Response to World War I [Online]. Available at: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/dyffryn-gardens/features/a-plantsmans-response-to-world-war-i (Accessed: 1 February 2022)

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500 Years of British Art