Articles from Charleston
Dr Darren Clarke, Head of Collections at Charleston, on the challenges of curating the historic interiors.
Charleston
A seventeenth-century farmhouse that became a retreat for the Bloomsbury Group, including Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.
Similar studio museums...
- The Münter House Germany - a countryside artistic project for Gabrielle Münter (1877-1962) and Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)
- Watts Gallery - Artists' Village, United Kingdom - an artists' village established by George (1817-1904) and Mary (1849-1938) Watts
- Carl Larsson Gården, Sweden - Carl Larsson (1852-1919) and his wife Karin's (1859-1928) shared project and family home
Feature List
- Café
- Historic garden
- Annual literary festival
Charleston was the home of Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) and Duncan Grant (1885-1978) from 1916, and it became a country meeting point for the so-called 'Bloomsbury Group', including Bell's sister Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and her husband Leonard Woolf (1880-1969), the economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), the art critics Roger Fry (1866-1934) and Clive Bell (1881-1964) and the biographer Lytton Strachey (1880-1932). Inspired by Italian fresco painting and Post-Impressionism, Bell and Grant set about decorating the interiors of the farmhouse, and redesigning the garden to feature mosaics and box hedges.
The house opened to the public in 1986 after a major restoration, and today visitors can enjoy the historic interiors decorated by Bell and Grant, as well as the artists' studio looking onto the garden. The collection also includes painted furniture, ceramics, paintings and textiles, and works by artists admired by the Bloomsbury group, including Renoir and Picasso.
