Tate Britain's Bloomsbury Show Traces Van Gogh's Early British Fans

Tate Britain opened Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury yesterday, 12 November, and the show's central argument is already clear: early 20th-century British modernism owed a direct debt to Vincent Van Gogh. The exhibition positions two artists who shared a home for more than 50 years as among the first Britons to absorb his work.

Curator Thomas Kennedy puts it plainly: "When Bell and Grant were doing new and exciting things, individuals like Van Gogh—who were creating something wildly different from other artists of the time—were very much an inspiration for them."

Who were Bell and Grant?

Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) and Duncan Grant (1885-1978) were pillars of the Bloomsbury group, the informal collective of progressive artists, writers and intellectuals named after the London quarter where they lived. They lived together in London, and from 1916 partly at Charleston farmhouse in rural Sussex.

The personal arrangements were, by any standard, tangled. Vanessa married the critic Clive Bell in 1907 in an open marriage, then began a relationship with Grant in 1909 that produced a daughter. Grant was homosexual, with numerous lovers including a male cousin and Vanessa's brother. Vanessa later had a brief relationship with the critic Roger Fry. The contemporary quip: they were "living in squares, painting in circles and loving in triangles."

How did Van Gogh reach Britain?

The mechanism ran largely through Roger Fry. In 1910 he curated Manet and the Post-Impressionists in London, inventing the term Post-Impressionism and introducing Van Gogh to a British audience. The show included around 30 works by the Dutch artist — the first time Londoners could see more than an isolated painting.

Grant, who studied in Paris in 1906, may have encountered Van Gogh there. Bell's discovery is documented precisely: in 1909, at a group exhibition at London's New Gallery, which included a single Van Gogh. She described it as "a lovely little Van Gogh of flowers in a jug." The lender was the publisher Thomas Fisher Unwin, who with his wife Jane had in 1896 become the first Briton to buy a Van Gogh after the artist's death.

Bell later recalled the moment Fry's 1910 exhibition landed: "That autumn of 1910 is to me a time when everything seemed springing to a new life - a time when all was a sizzle of excitement, new relationships, new ideas, different and intense emotions all seemed crowding into one's life."

What did the influence look like?

Not imitation. Bell and Grant, alongside Van Gogh, absorbed Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso, and began painting with heightened colours, simplified forms and strong lines.

The Tate show traces specific echoes. Bell's View into a Garden (1926, Bolton Library & Museum Services) includes two empty chairs, probably reflecting Van Gogh's paired paintings of his own chair and Gauguin's armchair — his own chair had entered London's National Gallery in 1923, so Bell likely knew it. In 1911 the critic Frank Rutter described Bell's Chrysanthemums (1920, Tate, not in this exhibition) as "undoubtedly influenced by Van Gogh," its dark background echoing the still life she had seen at the New Gallery.

The Provence connection mattered too. Bell, Grant and Fry visited the south of France regularly from the 1920s. Fry helped a friend buy a farmhouse in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, a few hundred metres from the asylum where Van Gogh stayed in 1889-90. Visiting Bell's house near Cassis, Grant called the landscape "far more extraordinary than St Remi".

What does this change for how we read Bloomsbury?

The exhibition reframes Bloomsbury not as a closed domestic circle but as a conduit for European modernism, with Van Gogh as a persistent presence. In 1912 both artists showed in Fry's second Post-Impressionist exhibition and co-designed its catalogue; Bell helped hang it. And in 1946, writing to Bell after seeing a Van Gogh exhibition in Copenhagen — "a splendid show" — Grant was still arguing with the mythology: "I really do not believe in his madness as an artist at all." Van Gogh, the show suggests, stayed in the couple's minds for the rest of their lives.