| Clive Bell 1881-1964  |
Grew up in the country, at Cleeve House in Wiltshire. Third child of four. Family fortune from coal-mining. Educated at Marlborough, then Trinity College at Cambridge. Married Vanessa Stephen in 1907. Two sons, Julian (1908-1937) and Quentin (1910-1996), were followed by a daughter, Angelica (1918-) who was acknowledged as Clive's child though she was the biological daughter of Duncan Grant. An early champion of post-Impressionist painters such as Cézanne, Van Gogh and Picasso, he became an art critic for the New Statesman and Nation in 1933, and held that position until 1943.
"There were in Clive two men, and both were at least a century out of date: one was the man about town, the dilettante, and the writer; the other, the squire, the countryman, and the sportsman. In the latter role he was, I think, more genuinely at ease, since his knowledge, skill and love of country life dated from childhood. In neither character did he quite fit into the world as it was, and one of the things that one loved him for was his refusal to recognise this, his ability to transform his surroundings either into the haunt of a sybarite or into the property of a landed gentleman." Published works: |
blog | fiction | journal | criticism | career | about