The Bloomsbury Group

The Bloomsbury Group, was an informal but influential group of artists, writers, and thinkers, living in or around the Bloomsbury district in London during the first half of the 20th century. The group included art critic Clive Bell, post-impressionist painter Vanessa Bell, fiction writer E. M. Forster, art critic, and post-impressionist painter Roger Fry, post-impressionist painter Duncan Grant, economist John Maynard Keynes, literary journalist Desmond MacCarthy, biographer Lytton Strachey, essayist and non-fiction writer Leonard Woolf, and fiction writer, and essayist Virginia Woolf.

The group formed an intellectual aristocracy of sorts and were responsible for greatly influencing modern attitudes towards literature, aesthetics, art and criticism, feminism, and sexuality. American writer Dorothy Parker once described the group saying, “they lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles”.

Nowadays the group are still recognized in the design industry for their unique aesthetic. Taking their principles from the arts and crafts movement, and embodying the belief that people should be surrounded by beautiful and well-made things that last, they hand-painted colorful murals on walls, patterns on furniture as well as on more traditional canvases, or anything they could lay their hands on. Their look was eclectic and as far as possible from the conventional or conservative interior design trends that marked their times.

A hand-decorated window at Charleston, the farmhouse between Brighton and Eastbourne where the Bloomsbury Group retreated during the First World War.