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This intimate pocket sketchbook was used by Vanessa Bell on a trip to Paris in 1921. Bell regularly used these, small sketchbooks to record what she saw as she travelled. On this trip, Bell was accompanied by Duncan Grant and their three-year old daughter, Angelica and the sketchbook contains a series of intimate studies of the young Angelica. Bell regularly visited Paris, in the previous year, travelling with Grant and Maynard Keynes, she had met Picasso, noting: ‘he showed us quantities of his latest works the things he is actually at work on, nearly all more or less abstract designs though I suppose usually suggested by nature. Some were amazingly beautiful. I think all gave one very definite sensations and he was interested to find out whether they were the ones he wanted to produce.’[1] Bell regularly met other contemporary artists in France, including André Derain, Georges Braque and Erik Satie.
This sketchbook can be read as a visual notebook, capturing scenes Bell saw in the city: walks along the Seine, glimpsing the river under bridges and in the gardens at Versailles. Bell makes studies of figures she sees, a sequence of candid sketches of Angelica, fragments of still life, observations of her own hand and fluid line drawings which echo the artists she encountered. We know that Bell and Grant again met Picasso in Paris, and some of Bell’s incisive line drawings perhaps show her awareness of new directions in French art. A study of a seated nude from behind, immediately recalls the large, classical nudes that Picasso was working on at this moment. Bell wrote of seeing ‘an astonishing painting of two nudes most elaborately finished and rounded’ noting also that she had seen ‘a magnificent large nude by Matisse.’[2] The sketchbook is also filled with notations, addresses and a list of expenses that Bell and Grant had incurred on their travels, it therefore acts as a highly personal resource, offering a fascinating insight into both the artist at work and a woman abroad.
The following year was to prove a fundamental one for Bell, she mounted a solo exhibition at the Independent Gallery. Roger Fry reviewed the exhibition commenting: ‘the first quality of Vanessa Bell’s painting is its extreme honesty… One feels before her works that every touch is the outcome of her complete absorption in the general theme… the attention is held at once by the peculiar charm and purity of her colour and by the harmony of her designs. In these she always shows an admirable sense of proportion… She shows, indeed, a keen sense of the underlying architectural framework.’[3] It is undoubtedly in Bell’s rigorous and relentless drawing that she refined her sense of design. Bell’s surviving sketchbooks are rare, this very complete example offers fascinating insights into her working practices and gives an intimate slice of her life at a pivotal moment.