Charleston Farmhouse

CHARLESTON FARMHOUSE – 1mile (15 minute walk or 5 minutes by car) Open April to October

In 1916 the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved in and Charleston Farmhouse became the country meeting place for the group of artists, writers and intellectuals known as Bloomsbury. It was seen as an unusual lifestyle for the period

Clive Bell, David Garnett and Maynard Keynes lived at Charleston for considerable periods; Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry were frequent visitors. In fact Roger Fry lived at Bo-peep Farmhouse for a while to be close to Vanessa Bell, but she paid him little attention.   The artists decorated the walls, doors and furniture. The walled garden was redesigned in a style reminiscent of southern Europe, with mosaics, box hedges, gravel pathways and ponds.

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, Matthew Smith, Sickert, Tomlin and Eugène Delacroix.

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