Vanessa Bell at Dulwich Picture Gallery John Soane’s picture gallery at Dulwich was the first building in England designed specifically for that purpose, and it is a favourite of ours. It was here, in February 2017 that, for the first and probably only time, a large number of works by Vanessa Bell were displayed together. This was the mission of the curator Sarah Milroy—to bring Bell’s work out of the shadows, and to secure her reputation for the future with this stunning exhibition. One of the pictures above shows Sarah with Ian Dejardin, her co-curator and co-author of the catalogue that we designed. At the private view there was an atmosphere of excitement among the many guests, and it was good to see the people we’d worked with—Sarah and Ian, Becca England and Louise Smith from Dulwich Picture Gallery, and Clare Martelli and Anne Jackson from Philip Wilson Publishers. Vanessa Bell was Ian’s last show as Director of the gallery—he is now Chief Executive of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Ontario. We much enjoyed his farewell speech which was, as always, enthusiastic and very amusing.
To see some pages from the book please click here