Painter and designer Vanessa Bell (née Stephen) trained at the Royal Academy Schools, afterwards founding the Friday Club (1905–10) for painters. Together with her writer sister Virginia Woolf, she was at the centre of the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals, writers, artists and philosophers. Her work was strongly impacted by Roger Fry’s first Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1910 – simplifying form and embracing bold colour – and included in its successor in 1912. She collaborated with Fry’s Omega Workshops (1913–19), held her first solo exhibition in 1916, and with her life partner, artist Duncan Grant, decorated every surface of their Sussex farmhouse home, Charleston – Bloomsbury’s informal country retreat. One wall of its distinctive painted interior provides the backdrop to her Still Life.