Conversation

© estate of Vanessa Bell. All rights reserved, DACS 2023. Image credit: The Courtauld

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Notes

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Three women are shown in earnest conversation before a curtained window through which a flower garden is visible. The arrangement of the bodies and the close grouping of the heads give the gathering a sense of drama and a conspiratorial air. It was this humorous and incisive quality that the author Virginia Woolf admired most about the painting when she praised it in a letter to her sister: ‘I think you are a most remarkable painter. But I maintain you are into the bargain, a satirist, a conveyer of impressions about human life: a short story writer of great wit and able to bring off a situation in a way that rouses my envy.’

The Courtauld Gallery

London

Title

Conversation

Date

1913–1916

Medium

oil on canvas

Measurements

H 86.6 x W 81 cm

Accession number

P.1935.RF.24

Acquisition method

bequeathed by Roger Eliot Fry, 1935

Work type

Painting

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The Courtauld Gallery

Somerset House, Strand, London, Greater London WC2R 0RN England

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