It has been ever such a long time since I have done one of these, but today I just couldn’t resist sharing this new-to-me painting by Vanessa Bell, titled “Interior With Housemaid”, and painted in 1939Â .
Though the fact that this gloriously colored painting depicts a housemaid and thus raises all kinds of troublesome questions about whether when housework is elevated to a profession, we can still consider it within our remit of “housewives in art”, nevertheless it features a woman involved in domestic work, and as it is my blog I do believe I can change the rules on the merest whim or fancy for what you must agree is a truly lovely work of art…
Intriguing because it features a woman who makes her living doing manual labour, in this painting she stands transfixed beside what could be the writing desk, where Vanessa Bell herself could have sat down to write her now famous collection of more than 3000 letters.
But like everything else to do with Charleston, ultimately it is the use of color that separates this  somewhat ordinary domestic scene apart. Look at those muddy plums and purples! That it should seem both vibrant and muddy seems to me to describe the truth about housework, and though this painting depicts a scene of privileged bohemia, at Vanessa Bell’s hand, housework becomes a thing of beauty.
Amazon.com: The Letters of Vanessa Bell: Vanessa Bell, Regina Marler, Regina Mahler, Quentin Bell: Books
Vanessa Bell was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group. The sister of Virginia Woolf and wife of Clive Bell, she lived at what is now the shrine of the Bloomsbury Group – Charleston Manor in Sussex, as part of a “menage a trois” with her husband and the artist Duncan Grant. There are more than 3000 of Vanessa Bell’s letters which survive. They show her to be an extremely unconventional woman for her time.
Create your own Brocante Life Book, plan Christmas, set up routines and rituals or live life the BrocanteHome way with my guided workbooks and planners.
Oh my dear lovely friends I hardly know where to begin. I have hesitated to write this because it seems to me that once you have committed something to paper then it becomes true, and more than anything else I do not…
I think you will agree that most E-Cards are gruesome. Who wants to find a flashing cartoony monstrosity lurking in your mailbox, even if the sentiment is heartfelt? So, thank goodness for VintageEcards.com, the only tasteful ecard purveyor on the web. With…
I spent yesterday in emotional crisis talks. Long conversations and a bit of spontaneous weeping over perfect green olives in Jamie Oliver’s. For I am tired. More tired than I can explain. I am tired and worried and worried and tired and…
Thank-you’s. As many of them as I am capable of offering. For little boys that talk too much and little boys who love football too much. For the geranium oil I have sprinkled into sesame oil so I could rub a medicinal…
If I ever grow up enough be considered a font of wisdom, this is what I shall say: Wait. Just wait. But live a life worth talking about in the meantime. Live it wholeheartedly. Live it so wonderfully, scrumptiously, deliciously well, that…
It’s official. My marbles have rolled under the bed. Or the dog has chucked them out of the window. Today I did something I have never done in eleven years of blogging: I accidentally posted something I have posted before. (Blink and…
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