Profiles  |  Origins  |  Members  |  Lifestyle and beliefs  |  Influence and achievements

Lifestyle and beliefs

[They] lived in squares but loved in triangles The Bloomsbury Group members were people whose family backgrounds lay in the nineteenth-century professional world of education, colonial administration, law and literature. This had given them social advantages and self-confidence but they were also linked by a spirit of rebellion against what they considered the unnecessary conventions, restraints and double standards of the previous generation. They wanted freedom to develop their own ideas and lifestyles. Bloomsbury Group Members © Tate Archive, 2003

Frederick Ashton, Lydia Lopokova, Duncan Grant and Billy Chappell © Tate Archive, 2003

To outsiders they were seen as outrageous, particularly because of their many love affairs, with partners seeming to move from one member of the Group to another. Even today it is this impression of Bloomsbury that often dominates thinking about them. A critic in a review of the Bloomsbury Exhibition at Tate in 1999, discusses Bloomsbury in terms of their relationships rather than their art: Above all, the personalities that counted as far as the inhabitants of Gordon Square and Charleston were concerned were their own: what Virginia had to say about Lytton, whether Duncan was sleeping with Vanessa or Maynard, and whether Roger and Clive knew or cared. Charles Derwent, The Independent on Sunday, 7 November, 1999

The social life of the Group revolved around the various houses of the members and their friends, and holidays together in France, Italy and Greece. The Bells, Woolfs and Lytton Strachey all had country houses, and they also enjoyed the hospitality of wealthy patrons including Lady Ottoline Morrell who frequently entertained them at her Garsington home. These house visits helped to widen the circle of acquaintance and brought in people such as the dancers Frederick Ashton and Lydia Lopokova, the star of the fashionable Ballet Russe. Charleston Farmhouse © Tate Archive, 2003