Vanessa Bell was born on the 30 May 1879. The sister of Virginia Woolf she was educated at home by her parents in languages, mathematics and history, and took drawing lessons from Ebenezer Cook before she attended Sir Arthur Cope's art school in 1896, and then studied painting at the Royal Academy in 1901. She married Clive Bell in 1907 and they had two sons together. The couple had an open marriage during which Vanessa Bell had affairs with art critic Roger Fry and with the painter Duncan Grant, with whom she had a daughter, Angelica in 1918. She died in 1961.
