Duncan Grant’s rediscovered portrait of Vanessa Bell surfaces

By Grace Kim

Duncan Grant’s portrait of Vanessa Bell, made in soft pencil and biro (ballpoint pen) within days of her death in 1961, will go on public display at Charleston in May 2027. The drawing surfaced among family papers during research for Tate Britain’s forthcoming exhibition of the two artists.

Grant dated the sheet “Friday April 14,” but Bell had died at the farmhouse a week earlier. Darren Clarke, Charleston’s head of collections and research, said Grant and his friends later sorted and labelled masses of pictures in his studio. The added date may therefore be an error made years later.

Clarke said:

“What seems very likely here is that Duncan knew this drawing had been made around Vanessa’s death and later added a date from memory. He got remarkably close, but apparently not quite close enough.

Everything about the drawing itself – its viewpoint, its intimacy and its extraordinary economy – suggests someone sitting quietly beside Vanessa’s bed and drawing the face he had known for half a century.”

The close viewpoint suggests Grant was sitting beside Bell’s bed. The drawing may have been made just after Bell’s death, although she could instead have been resting peacefully with her eyes closed. It was donated to Charleston, the former home of the Bloomsbury Group in East Sussex, now a museum and archive.

Grant was Bell’s sometime lover and lifelong friend, as well as her artistic partner. Charleston describes their relationship as one of the happiest and longest-lasting of the group’s tangled affairs. Grant was gay and a former lover of Bell’s brother Adrian; he and Bell were lovers for a time.

In 1918, they had a child, Angelica, who later married David Garnett, another of Grant’s lovers. They lived and worked for decades at the 17th-century farmhouse, covering many interiors with striking painted decoration. Grant outlived Bell by 17 years and was buried beside her in the churchyard of St Peter’s in Firle in 1978.

What does the discovery change for visitors?

The museum also describes Grant as long regarded as the group’s most talented artist. Tate Britain is making amends with Inside Bloomsbury, a major exhibition of work by both Bell and Grant.

The exhibition runs at Tate Britain from 12 November 2026 to 11 April 2027. Charleston is the exhibition’s largest lender, including the entire contents of Grant’s studio, while the newly discovered drawing will appear only in the catalogue.

The drawing itself will receive its first public display at Charleston in May 2027, when the studio reopens after major conservation work. Its donation forms part of the “50 for 50” campaign, which aims to bring 50 major works by the group back to the farmhouse by 2030.

That year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Charleston Trust, which runs and maintains the museum. The portrait now has two defined routes into public view: the Tate exhibition catalogue and a first display at Charleston.

Nathaniel Hepburn, Charleston’s director and CEO, said:

“I found this drawing deeply moving when I first saw it. We know Duncan’s drawings of Vanessa so intimately, made over the course of their long friendship, that the discovery of a previously unknown work is remarkable in itself.

But there is something incredibly poignant about imagining Duncan sitting beside Vanessa, drawing her after her death.”

For audiences, the change is concrete: Tate Britain’s catalogue will include the newly discovered portrait, and Charleston audiences can see the sheet from May 2027. This adds a documented object to the Tate exhibition and to Charleston’s 50-work return.

By 2030, the restored studio and the returning works will test how much of Bell and Grant’s shared output becomes visible again. The portrait gives that institutional return a specific public focus before the campaign’s 2030 deadline.