Charleston, the country home of the Bloomsbury group

Bloomsbury Group

The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half...

 is an example of Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury group, and the sister of Virginia Woolf.- Biography and art :...

 and Duncan Grant

Duncan Grant

Duncan James Corrowr Grant was a British painter and designer of textiles, potterty and theatre sets and costumes...

's decorative style within a domestic context and represents the fruition of over sixty years of artistic creativity. Vanessa Bell wrote of this time; "It will be an odd life, but...it ought to be a good one for painting."

In addition to the house and artists' garden, there is an exhibition gallery showing an exciting mix of contemporary and historical shows of fine and decorative art, a Crafts Council selected shop selling applied art and books relating to Bloomsbury, a small tea room and a video presentation. Charleston hosts a number of special events throughout the year, most notably the Charleston Festival which is centred around talks and drama relating to literary, artistic and Bloomsbury themes.

The house is located in the village of Firle

Firle

For the suburb of Adelaide, South Australia, see Firle, South Australia.Firle is a village and civil parish in the Lewes District of East Sussex, England. Firle refers to an old-English/Anglo-Saxon word fierol meaning overgrown with oak...

, in the Lewes District

Lewes (district)

Lewes is a local government district in East Sussex in southern England covering an area of , with of coastline. It is named after its administrative centre, Lewes. Other towns in the district include Newhaven, Peacehaven, and Seaford. Plumpton racecourse is within the district...

 of East Sussex

East Sussex

East Sussex is a county in South East England. It is bordered by the counties of Kent, Surrey and West Sussex, and to the south by the English Channel.-History:...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

.

History

In 1916 the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved to Sussex with their unconventional household. Over the following half century Charleston became the country meeting place for the group of artists, writers and intellectuals known as Bloomsbury. Clive Bell, David Garnett and Maynard Keynes lived at Charleston for considerable periods; Virginia

Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....

 and Leonard Woolf

Leonard Woolf

Leonard Sidney Woolf was an English political theorist, author, publisher and civil servant, and husband of author Virginia Woolf.-Early life:...

, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey

Lytton Strachey

Giles Lytton Strachey was a British writer and critic. He is best known for establishing a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit...

 and Roger Fry

Roger Fry

Roger Eliot Fry was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism...

 were frequent visitors. Inspired by Italian fresco painting and the Post-Impressionists

Post-Impressionism

Post-Impressionism is the term coined by the British artist and art critic Roger Fry in 1910 to describe the development of French art since Manet. Fry used the term when he organized the 1910 exhibition Manet and Post-Impressionism...

, the artists decorated the walls, doors and furniture at Charleston. The walled garden was redesigned in a style reminiscent of southern Europe, with mosaics, box hedges, gravel pathways and ponds, but with a touch of Bloomsbury humour in the placing of the statuary.

"It's most lovely, very solid and simple, with...perfectly flat windows and wonderful tiled roofs. The pond is most beautiful, with a willow at one side and a stone or flint wall edging it all round the garden part, and a little lawn sloping down to it, with formal bushes on it." — Vanessa Bell

The rooms on show form a complete example of the decorative art of the Bloomsbury artists: murals, painted furniture, ceramics, objects from the Omega Workshops, paintings and textiles. The collection includes work by Auguste Renoir, Picasso, Derain

André Derain

André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.-Early years:...

, Matthew Smith

Matthew Smith (artist)

Sir Matthew Smith was a British painter of nudes, still-life and landscape.-Biography:Matthew Arnold Bracy Smith was born on 22 October 1879 in Halifax, the son of a wire-manufacturer...

, Sickert

Walter Sickert

Walter Richard Sickert , born in Munich, Germany, was a painter who was a member of the Camden Town Group in London. He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the 20th century....

, Tomlin and Eugène Delacroix

Eugène Delacroix

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school...

.

Garden

Charleston's walled garden was created by the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant to designs by Roger Fry. Together they transformed vegetable plots and hen runs, essential to the household during the First World War, into a quintessential planted garden mixing Mediterranean influences with cottage garden planting. In the 1920s a grid of gravel paths gave structure to beds of plants chosen by Grant and Bell for their intense colour and silver foliage. These became the subject of many still lives over their long residence at Charleston. Dora Carrington wrote of the garden, "Never, never have I seen quite such a wonderful place!...What excellent things there will be to paint in that garden with the pond and buildings." Part of the garden’s sense of luxuriance and surprise comes from the variety of sculpture it contains. Classical forms sit side by side with life-size works by Quentin Bell, mosaic pavements and tile edged pools. The orchard offers shade from the sun and the pond a focus for tranquil contemplation. Above all this was a summer garden for playing and painting, an enchanted retreat from London life. As Vanessa Bell wrote in 1936, “The house seems full of young people in very high spirits, laughing a great deal at their own jokes… lying about in the garden which is simply a dithering blaze of flowers and butterflies and apples.”

Charleston Trust

The Charleston Trust is a charity set up in 1980 to restore and maintain the home of the Bloomsbury Group artists for the benefit of the public. The unique collection at Charleston is illustrative of the art and lifestyle of the influential Bloomsbury Group and has been on show to the public since 1986. Charleston attracts visitors from the local community as well as the rest of the UK and abroad.
Today although Charleston is no longer in crisis, its future is far from secure. The Charleston Trust does not have the funds to guarantee the preservation of the house for future generations and relies on its income from admissions, sales from the shop and tea room, membership fees from the Friends of Charleston and grants from various bodies and donations.

Events and exhibitions

The Charleston Festival takes place around May each year in a marquee in the gardens of the house and lasts about a week and a half. It is predominantly a literary festival that has hosted such figures as Peter Bazalgette

Peter Bazalgette

Peter "Baz" Bazalgette is a British media expert who helped create the independent TV production sector in the UK and went on to be the leading creative figure in the global TV company Endemol....

, Jung Chang

Jung Chang

Jung Chang is a Chinese-born British writer now living in London, best known for her family autobiography Wild Swans, selling over 10 million copies worldwide but banned in the People's Republic of China....

, Michael Frayn

Michael Frayn

Michael J. Frayn is an English playwright and novelist. He is best known as the author of the farce Noises Off and the dramas Copenhagen and Democracy...

, Patrick Garland

Patrick Garland

thumb|right|200pxPatrick Garland is a British actor, writer, and director.Garland started Poetry International in 1963 with Ted Hughes and Charles Osborne. He was a director and producer for the BBC's Music and Arts Department , and worked on its Monitor series...

, Stephen Poliakoff

Stephen Poliakoff

Stephen Poliakoff, CBE, FRSL is an acclaimed British playwright, director and scriptwriter, widely judged amongst Britain's foremost television dramatists.-Early life and career:...

, Patti Smith

Patti Smith

Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith is an American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist, who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses....

, Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters is a British novelist. She is best known for her novels set in Victorian society, such as Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith.-Childhood:Sarah Waters was born in Neyland, Pembrokeshire, Wales in 1966....

, Polly Toynbee

Polly Toynbee

Polly Toynbee is a British journalist and writer, and has been a columnist for The Guardian newspaper since 1998. She is a social democrat and broadly supports the Labour Party, while urging it in many areas to be more left-wing...

 and Simon Schama

Simon Schama

Simon Michael Schama, CBE is a British historian and art historian. He is a University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University. He is best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series A History of Britain...

.

It also holds an exhibition programme that has included: Norman Ackroyd

Norman Ackroyd

Norman Ackroyd, CBE, R.A. is an English artist known primarily for his aquatints. He is based in London.Ackroyd attended Leeds College of Art from 1957–61 and the Royal College of Art, London from 1961–64, where he studied under Julian Trevelyan. Subsequently he lived for several years in the...

, Stephen Finer

Stephen Finer

-Work:Finer participated in "British Art from the Arts Council Collection 1940-80" at the Hayward Gallery, 'Collazione Inglese ll' at the Venice Biennale and was in the touring exhibition, 'Men on Women', 'The Portrait Now' at the National Portrait Gallery and 'Painting the Century 101 Portrait...

, Derek Jarman

Derek Jarman

Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman was an English film director, stage designer, diarist, artist, gardener and author.-Life:...

, Desmond Morris

Desmond Morris

Desmond John Morris, born 24 January 1928 in Purton, north Wiltshire, is a British zoologist and ethologist, as well as a popular anthropologist. He is also known as a painter, television presenter and popular author.-Life:...

, Tom Phillips

Tom Phillips

Thomas Phillips was an English painter.Thomas Phillips or Tom Phillips may also refer to:-Culture:* Sir Thomas Phillipps , British antiquary and book collector...

, photographs by Patti Smith

Patti Smith

Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith is an American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist, who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses....

, Sir John Tenniel

John Tenniel

Sir John Tenniel was a British illustrator, graphic humorist and political cartoonist whose work was prominent during the second half of England’s 19th century. Tenniel is considered important to the study of that period’s social, literary, and art histories...

 and others.

There is also another single night event, The Quentin Follies, named after Quentin Bell

Quentin Bell

Quentin Claudian Stephen Bell was an English art historian and author.Bell was the son of Clive Bell and Vanessa Bell , and the nephew of Virginia Woolf . He was educated in London and at the Quaker Leighton Park School.Principally an artist, as a potter, he was drawn to academia...

, the son of Vanessa Bell, that raises money to buy back works of art by the Bloomsbury Set that are privately owned. It takes the form of a silent auction of donated works of art and an evening variety show with a number of acts from opera singing to music hall to stand-up comedy.

Further reading

• Bell, Quentin, Virginia Nicholson and Alen MacWeeney (2004). Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Gardens. London: Frances Lincoln Publishers
  Frances Lincoln Publishers
  Frances Lincoln Publishers is a British book publishing company based in London, founded by Frances Lincoln.The company was founded in 1977. It produces illustrated books, especially on art, architecture, design, gardening, landscape, and walking. In 1983, Francis Lincoln also started to publish...
  
  .