Beyond Bloomsbury: Life, Love and Legacy

Beyond Bloomsbury: Life, Love and Legacy explores the lives and works of an extraordinary group of writers, artists and thinkers, known as the Bloomsbury Group. Key figures include the great writer and pioneer of feminist thought Virginia Woolf, her sister the painter Vanessa Bell, and the circle of friends that gathered around these young women and became well-known as the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, named after the area of London where they lived in the first decades of the twentieth-century.

Primarily drawn from the National Portrait Gallery’s Collection and enhanced with key works from Sheffield Museums and York Museums Trust, this exhibition includes portraits of those most intimately associated with the Bloomsbury Group, but also fascinating friends and colleagues who were not central to the original group. The works include paintings, sculpture, drawings and photographs. Most of these representations are informal and intimate and were often made as tokens of friendship and sometimes of love – when displayed together they bring to life an intensely creative group of people who were passionate about their work and about each other. The exhibition will also include new works by the artist Sahara Longe specially commissioned by York Museums Trust and Sheffield Museums to respond to the exhibition and the work of Bloomsbury artists.