Clive Bell

Arthur Clive Heward Bell (16 September 1881 – 18 September 1964) was an English art critic, associated with formalism and the Bloomsbury Group. Bell died, aged 83, in London.

Bell was born in East Shefford, Berkshire, in 1881, the third of four children of William Heward Bell (1849–1927) and Hannah Taylor Cory (1850–1942). He had an elder brother (Cory), an elder sister (Lorna, Mrs Acton), and a younger sister (Dorothy, Mrs Hony). His father was a civil engineer who built his fortune in the family coal mines in Wiltshire in England and Merthyr Tydfil in Wales - "a family which drew its wealth from Welsh mines and expended it on the destruction of wild animals". They lived at Cleeve House in Seend, near Devizes, Wiltshire, which was adorned with Squire Bell's many hunting trophies.

He was educated at Marlborough and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history. In 1902 he received an Earl of Derby scholarship to study in Paris, where his interest in art originated. Upon his return to England, he moved to London, where he met and married artist Vanessa Stephen, sister of Virginia Woolf, early in 1907.

By World War I their marriage was over. Vanessa had begun a lifelong relationship with Duncan Grant and Clive had a number of liaisons with other women such as Mary Hutchinson. However, Clive and Vanessa never officially separated or divorced. Not only did they keep visiting each other regularly, they also sometimes spent holidays together and paid "family" visits to Clive's parents. Clive lived in London but often spent long stretches of time at the farmhouse of Charleston, where Vanessa lived with Duncan and her three children by Clive and Duncan. He fully supported her wish to have a child by Duncan and allowed this daughter, Angelica, to bear his surname. Clive and Vanessa had two sons (Julian and Quentin), who both became writers. Julian joined the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War as an ambulance driver. He was killed in 1937 by an enemy shell, aged 29.

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