Bloomsbury Group

Bloomsbury Group
Key Dates: 1904-

The Bloomsbury group was basically a group of like minded friends with a ‘common attitude to life’, many of whom had first met at Trinity College, Cambridge at the turn of the century.

From 1904 onwards they met regularly at the Gordon Square home of Thoby Stephen in Bloomsbury, London. Thoby and his sisters, Vanessa and Virginia, (later to become Bell and Woolf), and brother Adrian hosted ‘at homes’ when they and their friends indulged in free conversations about art, literature and philosophy.

‘Bloomsbury’ has become synonymous with both literary and artistic styles, as well as with economic theory and psychology. The group included Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Desmond McCarthy, Leonard Woolf and Saxon Sydney Turner. Bloomsbury writers included some of the great names of the 20th century; E.M.Forster, the critic and biographer Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf.

The Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant were greatly influenced by the Post Impressionists and their painting celebrates the sensuous beauty of everyday domestic surroundings.