Artist, Author. A respected landscape painter, she penned memoirs giving unique insights into the artistic milieu. Born Angelica Vanessa Bell, she was raised within the notorious Bloomsbury Group under a family dynamic of Wagnerian complexity; though her mother's husband, art critic Clive Bell, was said to be her parent, her actual father was the usually homosexual painter Duncan Grant (1885-1978). The "truth", however, was well-known within the Bloomsbury Group which gathered at the famous Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, though Angelica was kept in the dark until 1937. She studied drama at the London Theatre School in 1936 then in the early 1940s formed a romantic attachment with author David "Bunny" Garnett, who had been one of Grant's lovers. Against much advice, the couple wed in 1942 forming a turbulent union that somehow lasted 25 years and produced four children. Over the years, Garnett wrote while Angelica created paintings that attracted an ever-growing audience but the pair eventually parted in the late 1970s. In what may have been an attempt at self-therapy, and using literary talent possibly inherited from her aunt Virginia Woolf, she wrote the best selling 1984 "Deceived With Kindness," a rather caustic inside look at the Bloomsbury Group that caused some resentment but garnered her the 1985 J.R. Ackley Prize for an Autobiography. Angelica lived her final 30 or so years at Forcalquier in the South of France but continued to exhibit her work in British galleries and to administer the Charleston Trust. She was to publish 1998's "The Eternal Monument" and a 2010 collection of essays entitled "The Unspoken Truth: A Quartet of Bloomsbury Stories." Of her childhood environment she said: "The Bloomsbury Group was like a hydra-cut off one of its heads and another one appears."
Artist, Author. A respected landscape painter, she penned memoirs giving unique insights into the artistic milieu. Born Angelica Vanessa Bell, she was raised within the notorious Bloomsbury Group under a family dynamic of Wagnerian complexity; though her mother's husband, art critic Clive Bell, was said to be her parent, her actual father was the usually homosexual painter Duncan Grant (1885-1978). The "truth", however, was well-known within the Bloomsbury Group which gathered at the famous Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, though Angelica was kept in the dark until 1937. She studied drama at the London Theatre School in 1936 then in the early 1940s formed a romantic attachment with author David "Bunny" Garnett, who had been one of Grant's lovers. Against much advice, the couple wed in 1942 forming a turbulent union that somehow lasted 25 years and produced four children. Over the years, Garnett wrote while Angelica created paintings that attracted an ever-growing audience but the pair eventually parted in the late 1970s. In what may have been an attempt at self-therapy, and using literary talent possibly inherited from her aunt Virginia Woolf, she wrote the best selling 1984 "Deceived With Kindness," a rather caustic inside look at the Bloomsbury Group that caused some resentment but garnered her the 1985 J.R. Ackley Prize for an Autobiography. Angelica lived her final 30 or so years at Forcalquier in the South of France but continued to exhibit her work in British galleries and to administer the Charleston Trust. She was to publish 1998's "The Eternal Monument" and a 2010 collection of essays entitled "The Unspoken Truth: A Quartet of Bloomsbury Stories." Of her childhood environment she said: "The Bloomsbury Group was like a hydra-cut off one of its heads and another one appears."
Bio by: Bob Hufford
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