Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury Art: Omega Workshops, artists and patrons

Background and aims | Artists and patrons | Omega work | Omega's decline

Artists and patrons

Artists worked at the Omega studios for three and half days a week at a rate of thirty shillings. The rest of their time was to be devoted to fine art.

In an interview with Robert McDonald of the Canadian Broadcasting Company in 1976, Duncan Grant talks about the Omega Workshops and the financial help Omega provided for artists.

There was no formal recruitment process, instead Roger Fry visited exhibitions and art schools looking for new talent, and for a time Omega became a focus for young English avant-garde artists. These included Frederick and Jessie Etchells, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri Doucet, Nina Hamnett, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth and Wyndham Lewis. Employment was very informal and, with the exception of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, artists were often only associated with the workshops for a short time before moving on.

Omega's establishment was funded by sympathetic friends and colleagues (including Clive Bell and George Bernard Shaw) and its continuing existence relied heavily on the patronage of wealthy London society within artistic and literary circles. A dinner party was planned to celebrate the opening and to woo potential customers:

Letter from Christine Nash to John Nash on her working day at Omega

Omega Opening Dinner menu held at Gordon Square

We should get all your disreputable and some of your aristocratic friends to come - and after dinner we should repair to Fitzroy Sq. where would be decorated furniture, painted walls etc. Then we should all get drunk and dance and kiss. Orders would flow in and the aristocrats would feel sure they were really in the thick of things.

Vanessa Bell, as quoted in Bloomsbury Portraits, Richard Shone, 1976

The products were expensive and given the lukewarm coverage that Omega generally received from the Press, their appeal was exclusive. Customers included Madame Vandervelde, Lady Cunard, Lady Ottoline Morrel, and Princess Lichnowsky, wife of the German Ambassador. Many of the patrons were also friends of the Bloomsbury artists such as E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell and Ethel Sands.