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Lot 100^AR

Vanessa Bell
(British, 1879-1961)
Design for Fireplace Mural 76.3 x 55.8 cm. (30 x 22 in.)

15 June 2016, 15:00 BST

London, New Bond Street

Sold for £15,000 inc. premium

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Vanessa Bell (British, 1879-1961)

Design for Fireplace Mural
oil on paper
76.3 x 55.8 cm. (30 x 22 in.)
Executed in 1912

Footnotes

Provenance
The Artist's Family
Acquired from the 1991 exhibition by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Spink, Duncan Grant & Vanessa Bell: Design and Decoration 1910-1960, 23 October-22 November 1991, cat.no.5 (ill.b&w)

From the time of their earliest decorative interiors, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant stressed the importance of the fireplace in a room as its visual focus. Their imagery and colours chosen for the wall space above the mantelpiece – whether abstract or figurative – would suggest the rest of the room's decorative scheme. Two designs for overmantels by Bell are extant from 1913, the present work and the other in the Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven. Both have large female nudes as their chief features.

In Vanessa Bell's photograph albums (Tate Archive) there are several images of her studio at 46 Gordon Square, taken in 1913, that show Bell and Molly MacCarthy posing naked in front of a large decoration on canvas of nude female figures. The work offered here is a study for this decoration which was almost certainly intended for the fireplace wall of the studio, the fireplace indicated by the dark rectangle at lower centre. It is not known if the decoration itself was actually fixed to the wall; there is no record of it after 1913. All the more valuable therefore is the present design as a record of what was a major work in Bell's most simplified, Post-Impressionist style.

We are grateful to Richard Shone for compiling this catalogue entry.

Please note that this work has been requested for the forthcoming exhibition Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) to be held at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 8 February–4 June 2017.

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