Design for Overmantel

Vanessa Bell (née Stephen), 1879–1961

1912 to 1913

Oil on paper

Yale Center for British Art

Two figures, rendered in dark teal and blue, stand facing each other within a rectangular frame. Below them is a dark rectangular void, suggesting a fireplace. This painting is an early design for the wall above the fireplace in Vanessa Bell’s own studio at 46 Gordon Square, in the heart of Bloomsbury, London, the house to which she moved with her siblings (including her sister, the novelist Virginia Woolf) in 1904. The house was later occupied by the economist John Maynard Keynes, himself a member of the Bloomsbury Group and lover of Duncan Grant. Domestic decoration was central to Bell’s career. She was a key contributor to the short-lived Omega Workshops, a cooperative design workshop founded by her friend Roger Fry in 1913. Omega aimed to spread the Bloomsbury aesthetic through the app