THE JOURNAL | ART & DESIGN
A Bloomsbury Spirit: Art at Charlotte Street Hotel
House & Garden Arts Editor and author Fiona McKenzie Johnston explores Kit Kemp's unique collection of Bloomsbury artworks, which adorn the walls at Charlotte Street Hotel.
There’s something wondrous about encountering museum-worthy artwork in a more intimate setting. The drawing room of the Kit Kemp-designed Charlotte Street Hotel in Fitzrovia is enticingly layered with textiles and tone - and hung with pictures by Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Alongside is a gloriously expressive Post-Impressionist-painted desk. Tracing the tennis-playing figures on its surface, I’m transported a couple of streets west, and over a century back in time, to an excitingly experimental workshop for decorative and applied arts, run by the same Bloomsbury Group artists. Loved and admired by Kit, elements of their joy-infused palette and pattern weave through the hotel’s interiors, creating a pleasing sense of contemporary continuance - and framing the works in an exceptional context.
Left: Roger Fry's Rose Bowl in the Library; one of Kit's first acquisitions for the hotel.
Right: An original hand-painted desk from the Omega Workshops, located in the Drawing Room.
Who were The Bloomsbury Group?
Named for the area they lived in, the Bloomsbury Group numbered those mentioned, plus Vanessa’s husband Clive Bell, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and others. Dorothy Parker described them as having ‘lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles’. It’s accurate - but undersells their influence.
It began in 1910, when Roger mounted Manet and the Post-Impressionists. The exhibition introduced Cézanne, Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Picasso to the British public – and caused widespread consternation. Visitors were horrified by the colour and unconventional perspectives that defied classical representation, and a critic labelled the works ‘the output of a lunatic asylum’. But the impact on British art was immediate. And when, two years later, The Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition showed the same French artists again, Roger, Vanessa and Duncan’s own paintings were hung alongside, placing them at the forefront of the modern movement.
It was then that Roger, together with Vanessa and Duncan, turned his eye to interiors via the Omega Workshops. It opened in 1913, staffed by themselves and a rolling cast of other artists. The intention was to bring Post-Impressionist ‘gaiety and charm’ to furniture and furnishings, and the Fitzroy Square showroom was an exuberant vision. Screens, cupboards, and more were adorned with boldly cavorting figures or folk-influenced flowers, and bedspreads, cushions and rugs featured new abstract patterns.
Kit's Vision for Charlotte Street Hotel
And yet, ‘there was very little reference to any of those artists in the late 1990s when we were preparing to open the Charlotte Street Hotel, even in this area,’ recounts Kit Kemp. The observation prompted visits to the Victoria & Albert Museum’s extensive Bloomsbury collection, which in turn sparked the acquisition, from auctions and dealers, of the works that are in the private guest spaces - the drawing room and the adjoining library - and that between them offer more of the story.
Much of my work involves breathing new life into old buildings or giving character to new buildings. At the start of reconstruction, I realised there was nothing in the immediate area celebrating the Bloomsbury Group. This was my starting point and opened the door to a whole new adventure and exploration of their lives and time. The more I absorbed the more I was inspired by their lives, their friends, their art and the Omega Workshop.
Kit Kemp, Founder and Creative Director at Firmdale Hotels
Much of the hotel’s magnetism lies in the evident shared belief in art’s importance in the everyday, the viewing of a room ‘as a canvas’, the value of craft, and the merits of democracy. Because happily, the Bloomsbury marvels can be viewed even if you’re not a guest. A table can be booked in the restaurant, there are regular art tours led by Kit’s daughter Willow Kemp, and monthly book salons that take place in the drawing room. Each is an opportunity for discovery as layered as the decoration - and for the eye to be enchanted.
A bedroom overlooking Charlotte Street and the Dora Carrington room, which features a hand-painted mural, commissioned by Kit Kemp.
The Art Collection
There are bold portraits by Alfred Wolmarck, an English colourist included by Roger in The Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, and a wonderful self-portrait by Nina Hamnett, who moved between avant-garde circles in Paris and London, and had an affair with Roger. A lyrical Italian scene by Duncan hints at the extent of their travels through Europe - that often included visiting Matisse and Picasso – and their love for landscape. Another painting by Duncan of Charleston Farmhouse tells of their parallel life in East Sussex, while Vanessa’s of Canonbury Square does the same for their after-Bloomsbury city existence.
Still lifes were a favourite subject, both in the artists’ radical pre-war years, and – as seen here – when they became intimate reflections of domestic realism and vehicles for their appreciation of pattern. Behind Roger’s bowl of roses and beneath Vanessa’s is what might be an African-print cloth, lengths of which were sold at the Omega. There are further items from those Workshops, as well as a pair of panels and a 1930s bowl by Vanessa – and sculptures by her son Quentin Bell, which propel the story forward.
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Vanessa Bell's Basket of Flowers
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Paintings by Alfred Wolmark (left) and Nina Hamnett (right)
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Duncan Grant's A View in Lucca
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Roger Fry's Rose Bowl
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Vanessa Bell, Wild Flowers in a Vase
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One of a pair of stone busts by Quentin Bell
So too do occasional homages within the hotel’s decoration, which yet retain an original edge. In the dining room, a vibrant mural by Alexander Holweg, inspired by a (lost to the Blitz) example by Roger, unites portraits of Kit and her husband Tim with Duncan playing tennis, and laptops and mobile phones with Omega-era abstraction. See too the ceiling in the Dora Carrington room.
‘If Roger, Vanessa and Duncan were to stroll in today, we hope they’d think it was fun,’ says Kit.
About Fiona McKenzie Johnston
Fiona McKenzie Johnston has an MA in History of Art from the University of St Andrew’s, and has long written on art and interiors for newspapers and magazines including The Telegraph, The Sunday Times, Vogue, AD and House & Garden. Fiona lives on the East Sussex coast, twenty miles from Charleston – the house that, from the First World War onwards, was the Bloomsbury Group’s rural outpost.