Charleston

Charleston was the home and country meeting place for the writers, painters and intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury Group.

Charleston, the country meeting place of the Bloomsbury group is a unique example of Vanessa Bell's and Duncan Grant's decorative style within a domestic context and represents the fruition of over sixty years of artistic creativity. Vanessa Bell wrote of this time; "It will be an odd life, but...it ought to be a good one for painting."

In addition to the house and artists' garden, there is a Crafts Council selected shop selling applied art and books relating to Bloomsbury, a small tea room and a video presentation. Charleston hosts a number of special events throughout the year, most notably the Charleston Festival which is centred around talks and drama relating to literary, artistic and Bloomsbury themes.

In 1916 the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved to Sussex with their unconventional household. Over the following half century Charleston became the country meeting place for the group of artists, writers and intellectuals known as Bloomsbury. Clive Bell, David Garnett and Maynard Keynes lived at Charleston for considerable periods; Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry were frequent visitors. Inspired by Italian fresco painting and the Post-Impressionists, the artists decorated the walls, doors and furniture at Charleston. The walled garden was redesigned in a style reminiscent of southern Europe, with mosaics, box hedges, gravel pathways and ponds, but with a touch of Bloomsbury humour in the placing of the statuary.

"It's most lovely, very solid and simple, with...perfectly flat windows and wonderful tiled roofs. The pond is most beautiful, with a willow at one side and a stone or flint wall edging it all round the garden part, and a little lawn sloping down to it, with formal bushes on it." Vanessa Bell.

The rooms on show form a complete example of the decorative art of the Bloomsbury artists: murals, painted furniture, ceramics, objects from the Omega Workshops, paintings and textiles. The collection includes work by Renoir, Picasso, Derain, Matthew Smith, Sickert, Tomlin and Delacroix.