Vanessa Bell (British, 1879-1961) Self Portrait signed with initials, inscribed and dated 'VB/Self Portrait/50?' (in Duncan Grant's hand, verso) oil on canvas 42 x 31 cm. (16 1/2 x 12 1/4 in.) Painted circa 1952 Footnotes: Provenance Possibly Adams Gallery, London, 1961, where purchased by Cyril Connolly Sale; Christie's, London, 1 July 1993, lot 22 Sale; Christie's, London, 11 March 1994, lot 117 Private Collection, U.K. Exhibited London, Adams Gallery, Exhibition of Paintings by Vanessa Bell, October 1961, cat.no.39 London, Belgrave Gallery, British Post-Impressionist and Moderns, February-March 1985, cat.no.1 London, National Portrait Gallery, Mirror, Mirror: Self Portraits by Women Artists, 12 September 2001-20 January 2002; this exhibition travelled to Leeds, Leeds City Art Gallery, 18 April-9 June, Bath, Victoria Art Gallery, 22 June-1 August and Canterbury, Royal Museum & Art Gallery, 7 September-2 November 2002 London, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Vanessa Bell, 8 February-4 June 2017 Literature Sarah Milroy & Ian A.C. Dejardin, Vanessa Bell, Philip Wilson Publishers, London, 2017, pp.178-9 (col.ill) Richard Shone, The Art of Bloomsbury, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Tate Gallery Publishing, London, 1999, p.236, fig.133 (ill.b&w.) There are five extant self-portraits by Vanessa Bell dating from her last decade. All in their ways are revealing of her gradual withdrawal from the world as she confronts herself in her attic studio at Charleston. To anyone who knows something of Bell's character and art they can be mined for their biographical and aesthetic disclosures on several levels. For anyone knowing nothing of her, they might strike a chord of detachment, painted in a modest, even tentative style, the brushwork behaving itself in front of her watchful presence. The tonal range is quite low; it is warm but not effusive; the drawing is soft-edged, following but not emphasising the contours. Here she is, in her studio beneath the eves in the near silence of Charleston's second floor, among the few sounds, those barely audible ones of the painter's activity – the unscrewing of a paint tube , the exchange of brushes, the mixing of oil and turpentine. It was up here that, as her daughter Angelica said, 'she was in heaven'. The present Self-portrait contains paintbrushes, a plate for a palette and a framed painting by the artist, probably an Italian townscape, leaning against shelving behind her. The chair is covered in the fabric Bell had designed for Alan Walton's company in the early 1930s. A beam at top left shows the sharp slope of the studio ceiling; the room is lit from a long window overlooking Charleston's walled garden. Bell wears a broad sunhat to temper the distraction of light above her: when one is seated in her studio, there is only sky to be seen through the window. The hat shades her face whose features are indicated rather than spelt out, much as she had done forty years before in several portraits and figures . She looks extraordinarily like Virginia Woolf in her well-known painting of her sister in a deckchair of c. 1912. Some commentators have read this near-blankness as deliberate self-effacement but this goes against what we know of her personality and aesthetic. She was never a 'symbolic' painter; she did not aim to convey states of mind or make the viewer alert to some psychological undertow (though this is not absent from some her works). It is from her manner of painting, her choice of subject and colour scheme, her refusal to be drawn away from what she sees in front of her that we can deduce, especially in this painting, those elements of reticence, modesty and watchfulness that characterise her work, 'steeped in emotion deep but contained' as her friend and admirer Dunoyer de Segonzac wrote of her . We are grateful to Richard Shone for compiling this catalogue entry. This lot is subject to the following lot symbols: AR AR Goods subject to Artists Resale Right Additional Premium. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com