Tate Britain opens Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant show on the Bloomsbury circle

Tate Britain, the London gallery that holds the national collection of British art, has opened a new exhibition about two of the painters at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group. 'Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury' opened on 12 November 2026. The Bloomsbury Group was a circle of writers, artists and thinkers who met in London in the early 1900s.

The show is curated by Thomas Kennedy. It looks at the working lives of Bell, who lived from 1879 to 1961, and Grant, who lived from 1885 to 1978. The two lived together for more than 50 years, and their shared life runs through the exhibition.

Their story began with a marriage that did not last in the way it was meant to. Bell married the art critic Clive Bell in 1907. Two years later she began a relationship with Grant, had a daughter with him, and went on living with him. The couple first lived in London. From 1916 they divided their time between London and Charleston, a farmhouse in rural Sussex, in southern England.

Grant had already been learning his trade abroad. He studied art in Paris in 1906. Bell's own path into modern painting came through a single picture. In 1909 she saw a Van Gogh at a group exhibition at the New Gallery in London. The show included only one work by the Dutch painter, a flower still life lent by the London publisher Thomas Fisher Unwin.

Fisher Unwin and his wife, Jane, had been the first Britons to buy a Van Gogh after the artist's death in 1896. Van Gogh was not widely known in Britain at the time. That changed the following year, in 1910. Roger Fry, an art critic and painter, curated the London exhibition 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists'. Fry is credited with coining the term Post-Impressionism, a label for the painters who came after the Impressionists. That show introduced Van Gogh to a British audience.

The exhibition also includes work the two artists made in the years that followed. Bell painted a portrait of Fry in 1912. In 1914 Grant painted 'The Mantelpiece', and Bell painted 'Still Life on Corner of a Mantelpiece' that same year. Placed side by side, the two paintings of the same kind of shelf show how closely the pair worked.

For visitors, the show offers a way into a period when British painters were learning from France and the Netherlands, and arguing over what modern art should look like. It also tells the story of two people who made a home and a working life together outside the expectations of their time.

The exhibition is at Tate Britain in London. Further details on opening hours and tickets are available from the gallery.