CHARLESTON FARMHOUSE, A PHOTO ESSAY, PART THREE, INTERIORS, OBJECTS AND ROOMS

 

This is an excerpt from the official Charleston website: https://www.charleston.org.uk/event/house-visit/

Almost as soon as they moved to Charleston in 1916, Bell and Grant began to paint. Not just the walls, but on every surface imaginable, transforming the house into a living, breathing work of art. Over the following decades, Charleston became a gathering point for some of the 20th century’s most radical artists, writers and thinkers known collectively as the Bloomsbury group. It is where they lived out their progressive social and artistic ideals.

"If the place is Chekovian -- as perhaps all country houses situated in precariously unspoiled country, with walled gardens and fruit trees and not enough bathrooms, are -- it is not of Chekhovian ideleness and theatricality that it speaks but, rather, of the values by which Chekov 's good characters are ruled: patient, habitual work and sensible, calm behavior."

Janet Malcolm from A House Of One's Own

"Charleston is dominated by its workplace -- its studios and studies and the bedrooms to which guests retired to write. The communal rooms were only two in number -- the living room (called the garden room) and the dining room -- and were modest in size. They were not the house's hearth."

Janet Malcolm from A House Of One's Own

"The ubiquitous decorations only extend our sense of Charleston as a place of incessant, calm productivity."

Janet Malcolm

"I was drawn to the windows as if by a tropism. Today, we come to house to see the decorations and the paintings that Clive and Vanessa and Duncan collected as well as the ones that Vanessa and Duncan produced."

Janet Malcolm

"What Clive and Vanessa and Duncan looked at when they entered a room was the walled garden and a willow and the ponds and fields beyond, and as I looked out of the windows they had looked out of, I felt their presence even more strongly than I had when examining their handiwork and possessions."

Janet Malcolm