The Bloomsbury Stud: Stephen Tomlin at Philip Mould & Company
How does Stephen Tomlin fit into the Bloomsbury group? Philip Mould & Company's latest exhibitions seeks to find out...
June 14, 2023
Bloomsbury Stud promises an alternative perspective on the Group through the eyes of its principal sculptor, Stephen Tomlin. To go beyond Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry – ‘Tommy’’s contemporaries, who populate the many floors of Philip Mould & Company - and the Omega Workshops (1913-1919) where they made their names.
It doesn’t. Much comes from Charleston, with the help of the Henry Moore Institute, if not private collections. We can’t escape the House where, in archive materials, we catch him ‘tottering up to bed’ at 2am. It even opens with his portrait by another, commissioned by Eddy Sackville-West, a hint perhaps that here too, we will only see Stephen Tomlin through others’ gaze.
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But perhaps that’s the point of this spectacular exhibition. Tomlin is the very embodiment of Bloomsbury, his limited output evidence of a life lived ‘intensely and ferociously’. (In this, he shares something in common with his London forebears, the Rossettis, who don’t challenge our ideas about Victorian England, but rather reflect them back onto us.)
He dropped out of Oxford University after two terms, embraced new technologies, and indeed, played to the camera. Drugs and alcohol would leave him unable to practise for long periods of time, and cause his premature death.
What Tomlin’s collection lacks in number is more than made up in its diversity. From his early training under Frank Dobson, and naturalistic depictions on par with the portrait sculptures of Auguste Rodin, Tomlin moves into more expressionistic terrain.
It culminates in his late ceramics, a total realisation of the Bloomsbury Group’s values. These works are marked by their collaboration – designed by Tomlin, crafted by Phyllis Keyes, then painted by Duncan Grant – and likewise, the product of a complicated love triangle. Known for his ‘inexhaustible charisma and disarming good looks’, Tommy too had a voracious and gender-ambiguous sexual appetite. His ceramics speak to Dorothy Parker's famous remark that the Group ‘lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles’.
The midst is marked by the artist’s humour. We get a grumpy David Garnett, and a knobbly Duncan Grant. The cold gaze – and great privilege – of his father, Lord Tomlin, in bronze. Virginia Woolf, who so hated being ‘peered at’, here recast and reconsolidated in history by The Charleston Trust in the 1990s.
More excitingly, the American journalist Henrietta Bingham, coloured in a thoroughly modern red, her head cocked to the side in her typical interest. Statues cast for Diana Mitford, and sculptures of his sister, and his wife, all pay attention to the women in his milieu. As both a commercial gallery and exhibition space, Philip Mould & Company do well to sensitively curate under-represented artists and histories.
Yet Tomlin’s work is somewhat instrumentalised; he’s offered up as evidence of the moment of transition towards abstract sculpture of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, perhaps another nod to the Institutes whose funding helped make Bloomsbury Stud happen. But for an exhibition which seeks to restore the individual’s position in history, this reduction might be a step too far.
Take Dobson, whose multidisciplinary practice is well-curated in the main space, with his sculptures and paintings sat side-by-side. Tomlin, meanwhile, is placed in conversation with some seemingly unrelated paintings (bar a Grant/Tomlin duo of nudes in paint and bronze). Simon Bussy is over-selected, especially at the exhibition’s close, at the expense of his other contemporaries.
As the first solo exhibition - and book, and film - of the artist in the UK, an individual approach to curation is understandable. Philip Mould also selected the more transient, who ‘dipped in and out’ of the Set, a subtle hint at artists’ agency within the clique. We see the ‘Queen of Bohemia’ Nina Hamnett, ‘Britain’s Matisse’ Edward Wolfe, plus the ‘Artist Plantsman’ Cedric Morris. Wolfe’s works reflect the rising interest in Primitivism, whilst there’s more than a hint of Rousseau in Hamnett’s ‘Jungle Still Life’ (1950); there’s little space to speak of these complex art histories.
The paintings get more pastoral, perhaps conventional, the further we move from the exhibition space. Save for Jessica Dismorr’s startlingly modern portraits – themselves a rarity, only two of her vorticist paintings survive - and Gerard Leslie Brockhurst’s renderings in red chalk, the space is dominated by landscapes. More echoes of Charleston, the farmhouse, which looms in the background.
It’s a fitting end, for only Vanessa Bell matches Tomlin in his experimental use of colour. Much like Dismorr, many of her early works were destroyed during World War II, and few works from this period survive. This scarcity has only heightened their market value; for now, her flowers were the only stickered work sold. But not for long; Bloomsbury Stud will no doubt bring Stephen Tomlin to many more new buyers.
.jpg)
Bloomsbury Stud: The Art of Stephen Tomlin is showing at Philip Mould & Company until 11 August.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Bloomsbury Stud promises an alternative perspective on the Group through the eyes of its principal sculptor, Stephen Tomlin. To go beyond Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry – ‘Tommy’’s contemporaries, who populate the many floors of Philip Mould & Company - and the Omega Workshops (1913-1919) where they made their names.
It doesn’t. Much comes from Charleston, with the help of the Henry Moore Institute, if not private collections. We can’t escape the House where, in archive materials, we catch him ‘tottering up to bed’ at 2am. It even opens with his portrait by another, commissioned by Eddy Sackville-West, a hint perhaps that here too, we will only see Stephen Tomlin through others’ gaze.
But perhaps that’s the point of this spectacular exhibition. Tomlin is the very embodiment of Bloomsbury, his limited output evidence of a life lived ‘intensely and ferociously’. (In this, he shares something in common with his London forebears, the Rossettis, who don’t challenge our ideas about Victorian England, but rather reflect them back onto us.)
He dropped out of Oxford University after two terms, embraced new technologies, and indeed, played to the camera. Drugs and alcohol would leave him unable to practise for long periods of time, and cause his premature death.
What Tomlin’s collection lacks in number is more than made up in its diversity. From his early training under Frank Dobson, and naturalistic depictions on par with the portrait sculptures of Auguste Rodin, Tomlin moves into more expressionistic terrain.
It culminates in his late ceramics, a total realisation of the Bloomsbury Group’s values. These works are marked by their collaboration – designed by Tomlin, crafted by Phyllis Keyes, then painted by Duncan Grant – and likewise, the product of a complicated love triangle. Known for his ‘inexhaustible charisma and disarming good looks’, Tommy too had a voracious and gender-ambiguous sexual appetite. His ceramics speak to Dorothy Parker's famous remark that the Group ‘lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles’.
The midst is marked by the artist’s humour. We get a grumpy David Garnett, and a knobbly Duncan Grant. The cold gaze – and great privilege – of his father, Lord Tomlin, in bronze. Virginia Woolf, who so hated being ‘peered at’, here recast and reconsolidated in history by The Charleston Trust in the 1990s.
More excitingly, the American journalist Henrietta Bingham, coloured in a thoroughly modern red, her head cocked to the side in her typical interest. Statues cast for Diana Mitford, and sculptures of his sister, and his wife, all pay attention to the women in his milieu. As both a commercial gallery and exhibition space, Philip Mould & Company do well to sensitively curate under-represented artists and histories.
Yet Tomlin’s work is somewhat instrumentalised; he’s offered up as evidence of the moment of transition towards abstract sculpture of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, perhaps another nod to the Institutes whose funding helped make Bloomsbury Stud happen. But for an exhibition which seeks to restore the individual’s position in history, this reduction might be a step too far.
Take Dobson, whose multidisciplinary practice is well-curated in the main space, with his sculptures and paintings sat side-by-side. Tomlin, meanwhile, is placed in conversation with some seemingly unrelated paintings (bar a Grant/Tomlin duo of nudes in paint and bronze). Simon Bussy is over-selected, especially at the exhibition’s close, at the expense of his other contemporaries.
As the first solo exhibition - and book, and film - of the artist in the UK, an individual approach to curation is understandable. Philip Mould also selected the more transient, who ‘dipped in and out’ of the Set, a subtle hint at artists’ agency within the clique. We see the ‘Queen of Bohemia’ Nina Hamnett, ‘Britain’s Matisse’ Edward Wolfe, plus the ‘Artist Plantsman’ Cedric Morris. Wolfe’s works reflect the rising interest in Primitivism, whilst there’s more than a hint of Rousseau in Hamnett’s ‘Jungle Still Life’ (1950); there’s little space to speak of these complex art histories.
The paintings get more pastoral, perhaps conventional, the further we move from the exhibition space. Save for Jessica Dismorr’s startlingly modern portraits – themselves a rarity, only two of her vorticist paintings survive - and Gerard Leslie Brockhurst’s renderings in red chalk, the space is dominated by landscapes. More echoes of Charleston, the farmhouse, which looms in the background.
It’s a fitting end, for only Vanessa Bell matches Tomlin in his experimental use of colour. Much like Dismorr, many of her early works were destroyed during World War II, and few works from this period survive. This scarcity has only heightened their market value; for now, her flowers were the only stickered work sold. But not for long; Bloomsbury Stud will no doubt bring Stephen Tomlin to many more new buyers.
Bloomsbury Stud: The Art of Stephen Tomlin is showing at Philip Mould & Company until 11 August.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Bloomsbury Stud promises an alternative perspective on the Group through the eyes of its principal sculptor, Stephen Tomlin. To go beyond Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry – ‘Tommy’’s contemporaries, who populate the many floors of Philip Mould & Company - and the Omega Workshops (1913-1919) where they made their names.
It doesn’t. Much comes from Charleston, with the help of the Henry Moore Institute, if not private collections. We can’t escape the House where, in archive materials, we catch him ‘tottering up to bed’ at 2am. It even opens with his portrait by another, commissioned by Eddy Sackville-West, a hint perhaps that here too, we will only see Stephen Tomlin through others’ gaze.
But perhaps that’s the point of this spectacular exhibition. Tomlin is the very embodiment of Bloomsbury, his limited output evidence of a life lived ‘intensely and ferociously’. (In this, he shares something in common with his London forebears, the Rossettis, who don’t challenge our ideas about Victorian England, but rather reflect them back onto us.)
He dropped out of Oxford University after two terms, embraced new technologies, and indeed, played to the camera. Drugs and alcohol would leave him unable to practise for long periods of time, and cause his premature death.
What Tomlin’s collection lacks in number is more than made up in its diversity. From his early training under Frank Dobson, and naturalistic depictions on par with the portrait sculptures of Auguste Rodin, Tomlin moves into more expressionistic terrain.
It culminates in his late ceramics, a total realisation of the Bloomsbury Group’s values. These works are marked by their collaboration – designed by Tomlin, crafted by Phyllis Keyes, then painted by Duncan Grant – and likewise, the product of a complicated love triangle. Known for his ‘inexhaustible charisma and disarming good looks’, Tommy too had a voracious and gender-ambiguous sexual appetite. His ceramics speak to Dorothy Parker's famous remark that the Group ‘lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles’.
The midst is marked by the artist’s humour. We get a grumpy David Garnett, and a knobbly Duncan Grant. The cold gaze – and great privilege – of his father, Lord Tomlin, in bronze. Virginia Woolf, who so hated being ‘peered at’, here recast and reconsolidated in history by The Charleston Trust in the 1990s.
More excitingly, the American journalist Henrietta Bingham, coloured in a thoroughly modern red, her head cocked to the side in her typical interest. Statues cast for Diana Mitford, and sculptures of his sister, and his wife, all pay attention to the women in his milieu. As both a commercial gallery and exhibition space, Philip Mould & Company do well to sensitively curate under-represented artists and histories.
Yet Tomlin’s work is somewhat instrumentalised; he’s offered up as evidence of the moment of transition towards abstract sculpture of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, perhaps another nod to the Institutes whose funding helped make Bloomsbury Stud happen. But for an exhibition which seeks to restore the individual’s position in history, this reduction might be a step too far.
Take Dobson, whose multidisciplinary practice is well-curated in the main space, with his sculptures and paintings sat side-by-side. Tomlin, meanwhile, is placed in conversation with some seemingly unrelated paintings (bar a Grant/Tomlin duo of nudes in paint and bronze). Simon Bussy is over-selected, especially at the exhibition’s close, at the expense of his other contemporaries.
As the first solo exhibition - and book, and film - of the artist in the UK, an individual approach to curation is understandable. Philip Mould also selected the more transient, who ‘dipped in and out’ of the Set, a subtle hint at artists’ agency within the clique. We see the ‘Queen of Bohemia’ Nina Hamnett, ‘Britain’s Matisse’ Edward Wolfe, plus the ‘Artist Plantsman’ Cedric Morris. Wolfe’s works reflect the rising interest in Primitivism, whilst there’s more than a hint of Rousseau in Hamnett’s ‘Jungle Still Life’ (1950); there’s little space to speak of these complex art histories.
The paintings get more pastoral, perhaps conventional, the further we move from the exhibition space. Save for Jessica Dismorr’s startlingly modern portraits – themselves a rarity, only two of her vorticist paintings survive - and Gerard Leslie Brockhurst’s renderings in red chalk, the space is dominated by landscapes. More echoes of Charleston, the farmhouse, which looms in the background.
It’s a fitting end, for only Vanessa Bell matches Tomlin in his experimental use of colour. Much like Dismorr, many of her early works were destroyed during World War II, and few works from this period survive. This scarcity has only heightened their market value; for now, her flowers were the only stickered work sold. But not for long; Bloomsbury Stud will no doubt bring Stephen Tomlin to many more new buyers.
Bloomsbury Stud: The Art of Stephen Tomlin is showing at Philip Mould & Company until 11 August.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Bloomsbury Stud promises an alternative perspective on the Group through the eyes of its principal sculptor, Stephen Tomlin. To go beyond Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry – ‘Tommy’’s contemporaries, who populate the many floors of Philip Mould & Company - and the Omega Workshops (1913-1919) where they made their names.
It doesn’t. Much comes from Charleston, with the help of the Henry Moore Institute, if not private collections. We can’t escape the House where, in archive materials, we catch him ‘tottering up to bed’ at 2am. It even opens with his portrait by another, commissioned by Eddy Sackville-West, a hint perhaps that here too, we will only see Stephen Tomlin through others’ gaze.
But perhaps that’s the point of this spectacular exhibition. Tomlin is the very embodiment of Bloomsbury, his limited output evidence of a life lived ‘intensely and ferociously’. (In this, he shares something in common with his London forebears, the Rossettis, who don’t challenge our ideas about Victorian England, but rather reflect them back onto us.)
He dropped out of Oxford University after two terms, embraced new technologies, and indeed, played to the camera. Drugs and alcohol would leave him unable to practise for long periods of time, and cause his premature death.
What Tomlin’s collection lacks in number is more than made up in its diversity. From his early training under Frank Dobson, and naturalistic depictions on par with the portrait sculptures of Auguste Rodin, Tomlin moves into more expressionistic terrain.
It culminates in his late ceramics, a total realisation of the Bloomsbury Group’s values. These works are marked by their collaboration – designed by Tomlin, crafted by Phyllis Keyes, then painted by Duncan Grant – and likewise, the product of a complicated love triangle. Known for his ‘inexhaustible charisma and disarming good looks’, Tommy too had a voracious and gender-ambiguous sexual appetite. His ceramics speak to Dorothy Parker's famous remark that the Group ‘lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles’.
The midst is marked by the artist’s humour. We get a grumpy David Garnett, and a knobbly Duncan Grant. The cold gaze – and great privilege – of his father, Lord Tomlin, in bronze. Virginia Woolf, who so hated being ‘peered at’, here recast and reconsolidated in history by The Charleston Trust in the 1990s.
More excitingly, the American journalist Henrietta Bingham, coloured in a thoroughly modern red, her head cocked to the side in her typical interest. Statues cast for Diana Mitford, and sculptures of his sister, and his wife, all pay attention to the women in his milieu. As both a commercial gallery and exhibition space, Philip Mould & Company do well to sensitively curate under-represented artists and histories.
Yet Tomlin’s work is somewhat instrumentalised; he’s offered up as evidence of the moment of transition towards abstract sculpture of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, perhaps another nod to the Institutes whose funding helped make Bloomsbury Stud happen. But for an exhibition which seeks to restore the individual’s position in history, this reduction might be a step too far.
Take Dobson, whose multidisciplinary practice is well-curated in the main space, with his sculptures and paintings sat side-by-side. Tomlin, meanwhile, is placed in conversation with some seemingly unrelated paintings (bar a Grant/Tomlin duo of nudes in paint and bronze). Simon Bussy is over-selected, especially at the exhibition’s close, at the expense of his other contemporaries.
As the first solo exhibition - and book, and film - of the artist in the UK, an individual approach to curation is understandable. Philip Mould also selected the more transient, who ‘dipped in and out’ of the Set, a subtle hint at artists’ agency within the clique. We see the ‘Queen of Bohemia’ Nina Hamnett, ‘Britain’s Matisse’ Edward Wolfe, plus the ‘Artist Plantsman’ Cedric Morris. Wolfe’s works reflect the rising interest in Primitivism, whilst there’s more than a hint of Rousseau in Hamnett’s ‘Jungle Still Life’ (1950); there’s little space to speak of these complex art histories.
The paintings get more pastoral, perhaps conventional, the further we move from the exhibition space. Save for Jessica Dismorr’s startlingly modern portraits – themselves a rarity, only two of her vorticist paintings survive - and Gerard Leslie Brockhurst’s renderings in red chalk, the space is dominated by landscapes. More echoes of Charleston, the farmhouse, which looms in the background.
It’s a fitting end, for only Vanessa Bell matches Tomlin in his experimental use of colour. Much like Dismorr, many of her early works were destroyed during World War II, and few works from this period survive. This scarcity has only heightened their market value; for now, her flowers were the only stickered work sold. But not for long; Bloomsbury Stud will no doubt bring Stephen Tomlin to many more new buyers.
Bloomsbury Stud: The Art of Stephen Tomlin is showing at Philip Mould & Company until 11 August.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Bloomsbury Stud promises an alternative perspective on the Group through the eyes of its principal sculptor, Stephen Tomlin. To go beyond Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry – ‘Tommy’’s contemporaries, who populate the many floors of Philip Mould & Company - and the Omega Workshops (1913-1919) where they made their names.
It doesn’t. Much comes from Charleston, with the help of the Henry Moore Institute, if not private collections. We can’t escape the House where, in archive materials, we catch him ‘tottering up to bed’ at 2am. It even opens with his portrait by another, commissioned by Eddy Sackville-West, a hint perhaps that here too, we will only see Stephen Tomlin through others’ gaze.
But perhaps that’s the point of this spectacular exhibition. Tomlin is the very embodiment of Bloomsbury, his limited output evidence of a life lived ‘intensely and ferociously’. (In this, he shares something in common with his London forebears, the Rossettis, who don’t challenge our ideas about Victorian England, but rather reflect them back onto us.)
He dropped out of Oxford University after two terms, embraced new technologies, and indeed, played to the camera. Drugs and alcohol would leave him unable to practise for long periods of time, and cause his premature death.
What Tomlin’s collection lacks in number is more than made up in its diversity. From his early training under Frank Dobson, and naturalistic depictions on par with the portrait sculptures of Auguste Rodin, Tomlin moves into more expressionistic terrain.
It culminates in his late ceramics, a total realisation of the Bloomsbury Group’s values. These works are marked by their collaboration – designed by Tomlin, crafted by Phyllis Keyes, then painted by Duncan Grant – and likewise, the product of a complicated love triangle. Known for his ‘inexhaustible charisma and disarming good looks’, Tommy too had a voracious and gender-ambiguous sexual appetite. His ceramics speak to Dorothy Parker's famous remark that the Group ‘lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles’.
The midst is marked by the artist’s humour. We get a grumpy David Garnett, and a knobbly Duncan Grant. The cold gaze – and great privilege – of his father, Lord Tomlin, in bronze. Virginia Woolf, who so hated being ‘peered at’, here recast and reconsolidated in history by The Charleston Trust in the 1990s.
More excitingly, the American journalist Henrietta Bingham, coloured in a thoroughly modern red, her head cocked to the side in her typical interest. Statues cast for Diana Mitford, and sculptures of his sister, and his wife, all pay attention to the women in his milieu. As both a commercial gallery and exhibition space, Philip Mould & Company do well to sensitively curate under-represented artists and histories.
Yet Tomlin’s work is somewhat instrumentalised; he’s offered up as evidence of the moment of transition towards abstract sculpture of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, perhaps another nod to the Institutes whose funding helped make Bloomsbury Stud happen. But for an exhibition which seeks to restore the individual’s position in history, this reduction might be a step too far.
Take Dobson, whose multidisciplinary practice is well-curated in the main space, with his sculptures and paintings sat side-by-side. Tomlin, meanwhile, is placed in conversation with some seemingly unrelated paintings (bar a Grant/Tomlin duo of nudes in paint and bronze). Simon Bussy is over-selected, especially at the exhibition’s close, at the expense of his other contemporaries.
As the first solo exhibition - and book, and film - of the artist in the UK, an individual approach to curation is understandable. Philip Mould also selected the more transient, who ‘dipped in and out’ of the Set, a subtle hint at artists’ agency within the clique. We see the ‘Queen of Bohemia’ Nina Hamnett, ‘Britain’s Matisse’ Edward Wolfe, plus the ‘Artist Plantsman’ Cedric Morris. Wolfe’s works reflect the rising interest in Primitivism, whilst there’s more than a hint of Rousseau in Hamnett’s ‘Jungle Still Life’ (1950); there’s little space to speak of these complex art histories.
The paintings get more pastoral, perhaps conventional, the further we move from the exhibition space. Save for Jessica Dismorr’s startlingly modern portraits – themselves a rarity, only two of her vorticist paintings survive - and Gerard Leslie Brockhurst’s renderings in red chalk, the space is dominated by landscapes. More echoes of Charleston, the farmhouse, which looms in the background.
It’s a fitting end, for only Vanessa Bell matches Tomlin in his experimental use of colour. Much like Dismorr, many of her early works were destroyed during World War II, and few works from this period survive. This scarcity has only heightened their market value; for now, her flowers were the only stickered work sold. But not for long; Bloomsbury Stud will no doubt bring Stephen Tomlin to many more new buyers.
Bloomsbury Stud: The Art of Stephen Tomlin is showing at Philip Mould & Company until 11 August.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Bloomsbury Stud promises an alternative perspective on the Group through the eyes of its principal sculptor, Stephen Tomlin. To go beyond Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry – ‘Tommy’’s contemporaries, who populate the many floors of Philip Mould & Company - and the Omega Workshops (1913-1919) where they made their names.
It doesn’t. Much comes from Charleston, with the help of the Henry Moore Institute, if not private collections. We can’t escape the House where, in archive materials, we catch him ‘tottering up to bed’ at 2am. It even opens with his portrait by another, commissioned by Eddy Sackville-West, a hint perhaps that here too, we will only see Stephen Tomlin through others’ gaze.
But perhaps that’s the point of this spectacular exhibition. Tomlin is the very embodiment of Bloomsbury, his limited output evidence of a life lived ‘intensely and ferociously’. (In this, he shares something in common with his London forebears, the Rossettis, who don’t challenge our ideas about Victorian England, but rather reflect them back onto us.)
He dropped out of Oxford University after two terms, embraced new technologies, and indeed, played to the camera. Drugs and alcohol would leave him unable to practise for long periods of time, and cause his premature death.
What Tomlin’s collection lacks in number is more than made up in its diversity. From his early training under Frank Dobson, and naturalistic depictions on par with the portrait sculptures of Auguste Rodin, Tomlin moves into more expressionistic terrain.
It culminates in his late ceramics, a total realisation of the Bloomsbury Group’s values. These works are marked by their collaboration – designed by Tomlin, crafted by Phyllis Keyes, then painted by Duncan Grant – and likewise, the product of a complicated love triangle. Known for his ‘inexhaustible charisma and disarming good looks’, Tommy too had a voracious and gender-ambiguous sexual appetite. His ceramics speak to Dorothy Parker's famous remark that the Group ‘lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles’.
The midst is marked by the artist’s humour. We get a grumpy David Garnett, and a knobbly Duncan Grant. The cold gaze – and great privilege – of his father, Lord Tomlin, in bronze. Virginia Woolf, who so hated being ‘peered at’, here recast and reconsolidated in history by The Charleston Trust in the 1990s.
More excitingly, the American journalist Henrietta Bingham, coloured in a thoroughly modern red, her head cocked to the side in her typical interest. Statues cast for Diana Mitford, and sculptures of his sister, and his wife, all pay attention to the women in his milieu. As both a commercial gallery and exhibition space, Philip Mould & Company do well to sensitively curate under-represented artists and histories.
Yet Tomlin’s work is somewhat instrumentalised; he’s offered up as evidence of the moment of transition towards abstract sculpture of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, perhaps another nod to the Institutes whose funding helped make Bloomsbury Stud happen. But for an exhibition which seeks to restore the individual’s position in history, this reduction might be a step too far.
Take Dobson, whose multidisciplinary practice is well-curated in the main space, with his sculptures and paintings sat side-by-side. Tomlin, meanwhile, is placed in conversation with some seemingly unrelated paintings (bar a Grant/Tomlin duo of nudes in paint and bronze). Simon Bussy is over-selected, especially at the exhibition’s close, at the expense of his other contemporaries.
As the first solo exhibition - and book, and film - of the artist in the UK, an individual approach to curation is understandable. Philip Mould also selected the more transient, who ‘dipped in and out’ of the Set, a subtle hint at artists’ agency within the clique. We see the ‘Queen of Bohemia’ Nina Hamnett, ‘Britain’s Matisse’ Edward Wolfe, plus the ‘Artist Plantsman’ Cedric Morris. Wolfe’s works reflect the rising interest in Primitivism, whilst there’s more than a hint of Rousseau in Hamnett’s ‘Jungle Still Life’ (1950); there’s little space to speak of these complex art histories.
The paintings get more pastoral, perhaps conventional, the further we move from the exhibition space. Save for Jessica Dismorr’s startlingly modern portraits – themselves a rarity, only two of her vorticist paintings survive - and Gerard Leslie Brockhurst’s renderings in red chalk, the space is dominated by landscapes. More echoes of Charleston, the farmhouse, which looms in the background.
It’s a fitting end, for only Vanessa Bell matches Tomlin in his experimental use of colour. Much like Dismorr, many of her early works were destroyed during World War II, and few works from this period survive. This scarcity has only heightened their market value; for now, her flowers were the only stickered work sold. But not for long; Bloomsbury Stud will no doubt bring Stephen Tomlin to many more new buyers.
Bloomsbury Stud: The Art of Stephen Tomlin is showing at Philip Mould & Company until 11 August.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Bloomsbury Stud promises an alternative perspective on the Group through the eyes of its principal sculptor, Stephen Tomlin. To go beyond Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry – ‘Tommy’’s contemporaries, who populate the many floors of Philip Mould & Company - and the Omega Workshops (1913-1919) where they made their names.
It doesn’t. Much comes from Charleston, with the help of the Henry Moore Institute, if not private collections. We can’t escape the House where, in archive materials, we catch him ‘tottering up to bed’ at 2am. It even opens with his portrait by another, commissioned by Eddy Sackville-West, a hint perhaps that here too, we will only see Stephen Tomlin through others’ gaze.
But perhaps that’s the point of this spectacular exhibition. Tomlin is the very embodiment of Bloomsbury, his limited output evidence of a life lived ‘intensely and ferociously’. (In this, he shares something in common with his London forebears, the Rossettis, who don’t challenge our ideas about Victorian England, but rather reflect them back onto us.)
He dropped out of Oxford University after two terms, embraced new technologies, and indeed, played to the camera. Drugs and alcohol would leave him unable to practise for long periods of time, and cause his premature death.
What Tomlin’s collection lacks in number is more than made up in its diversity. From his early training under Frank Dobson, and naturalistic depictions on par with the portrait sculptures of Auguste Rodin, Tomlin moves into more expressionistic terrain.
It culminates in his late ceramics, a total realisation of the Bloomsbury Group’s values. These works are marked by their collaboration – designed by Tomlin, crafted by Phyllis Keyes, then painted by Duncan Grant – and likewise, the product of a complicated love triangle. Known for his ‘inexhaustible charisma and disarming good looks’, Tommy too had a voracious and gender-ambiguous sexual appetite. His ceramics speak to Dorothy Parker's famous remark that the Group ‘lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles’.
The midst is marked by the artist’s humour. We get a grumpy David Garnett, and a knobbly Duncan Grant. The cold gaze – and great privilege – of his father, Lord Tomlin, in bronze. Virginia Woolf, who so hated being ‘peered at’, here recast and reconsolidated in history by The Charleston Trust in the 1990s.
More excitingly, the American journalist Henrietta Bingham, coloured in a thoroughly modern red, her head cocked to the side in her typical interest. Statues cast for Diana Mitford, and sculptures of his sister, and his wife, all pay attention to the women in his milieu. As both a commercial gallery and exhibition space, Philip Mould & Company do well to sensitively curate under-represented artists and histories.
Yet Tomlin’s work is somewhat instrumentalised; he’s offered up as evidence of the moment of transition towards abstract sculpture of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, perhaps another nod to the Institutes whose funding helped make Bloomsbury Stud happen. But for an exhibition which seeks to restore the individual’s position in history, this reduction might be a step too far.
Take Dobson, whose multidisciplinary practice is well-curated in the main space, with his sculptures and paintings sat side-by-side. Tomlin, meanwhile, is placed in conversation with some seemingly unrelated paintings (bar a Grant/Tomlin duo of nudes in paint and bronze). Simon Bussy is over-selected, especially at the exhibition’s close, at the expense of his other contemporaries.
As the first solo exhibition - and book, and film - of the artist in the UK, an individual approach to curation is understandable. Philip Mould also selected the more transient, who ‘dipped in and out’ of the Set, a subtle hint at artists’ agency within the clique. We see the ‘Queen of Bohemia’ Nina Hamnett, ‘Britain’s Matisse’ Edward Wolfe, plus the ‘Artist Plantsman’ Cedric Morris. Wolfe’s works reflect the rising interest in Primitivism, whilst there’s more than a hint of Rousseau in Hamnett’s ‘Jungle Still Life’ (1950); there’s little space to speak of these complex art histories.
The paintings get more pastoral, perhaps conventional, the further we move from the exhibition space. Save for Jessica Dismorr’s startlingly modern portraits – themselves a rarity, only two of her vorticist paintings survive - and Gerard Leslie Brockhurst’s renderings in red chalk, the space is dominated by landscapes. More echoes of Charleston, the farmhouse, which looms in the background.
It’s a fitting end, for only Vanessa Bell matches Tomlin in his experimental use of colour. Much like Dismorr, many of her early works were destroyed during World War II, and few works from this period survive. This scarcity has only heightened their market value; for now, her flowers were the only stickered work sold. But not for long; Bloomsbury Stud will no doubt bring Stephen Tomlin to many more new buyers.
Bloomsbury Stud: The Art of Stephen Tomlin is showing at Philip Mould & Company until 11 August.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Bloomsbury Stud promises an alternative perspective on the Group through the eyes of its principal sculptor, Stephen Tomlin. To go beyond Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry – ‘Tommy’’s contemporaries, who populate the many floors of Philip Mould & Company - and the Omega Workshops (1913-1919) where they made their names.
It doesn’t. Much comes from Charleston, with the help of the Henry Moore Institute, if not private collections. We can’t escape the House where, in archive materials, we catch him ‘tottering up to bed’ at 2am. It even opens with his portrait by another, commissioned by Eddy Sackville-West, a hint perhaps that here too, we will only see Stephen Tomlin through others’ gaze.
But perhaps that’s the point of this spectacular exhibition. Tomlin is the very embodiment of Bloomsbury, his limited output evidence of a life lived ‘intensely and ferociously’. (In this, he shares something in common with his London forebears, the Rossettis, who don’t challenge our ideas about Victorian England, but rather reflect them back onto us.)
He dropped out of Oxford University after two terms, embraced new technologies, and indeed, played to the camera. Drugs and alcohol would leave him unable to practise for long periods of time, and cause his premature death.
What Tomlin’s collection lacks in number is more than made up in its diversity. From his early training under Frank Dobson, and naturalistic depictions on par with the portrait sculptures of Auguste Rodin, Tomlin moves into more expressionistic terrain.
It culminates in his late ceramics, a total realisation of the Bloomsbury Group’s values. These works are marked by their collaboration – designed by Tomlin, crafted by Phyllis Keyes, then painted by Duncan Grant – and likewise, the product of a complicated love triangle. Known for his ‘inexhaustible charisma and disarming good looks’, Tommy too had a voracious and gender-ambiguous sexual appetite. His ceramics speak to Dorothy Parker's famous remark that the Group ‘lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles’.
The midst is marked by the artist’s humour. We get a grumpy David Garnett, and a knobbly Duncan Grant. The cold gaze – and great privilege – of his father, Lord Tomlin, in bronze. Virginia Woolf, who so hated being ‘peered at’, here recast and reconsolidated in history by The Charleston Trust in the 1990s.
More excitingly, the American journalist Henrietta Bingham, coloured in a thoroughly modern red, her head cocked to the side in her typical interest. Statues cast for Diana Mitford, and sculptures of his sister, and his wife, all pay attention to the women in his milieu. As both a commercial gallery and exhibition space, Philip Mould & Company do well to sensitively curate under-represented artists and histories.
Yet Tomlin’s work is somewhat instrumentalised; he’s offered up as evidence of the moment of transition towards abstract sculpture of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, perhaps another nod to the Institutes whose funding helped make Bloomsbury Stud happen. But for an exhibition which seeks to restore the individual’s position in history, this reduction might be a step too far.
Take Dobson, whose multidisciplinary practice is well-curated in the main space, with his sculptures and paintings sat side-by-side. Tomlin, meanwhile, is placed in conversation with some seemingly unrelated paintings (bar a Grant/Tomlin duo of nudes in paint and bronze). Simon Bussy is over-selected, especially at the exhibition’s close, at the expense of his other contemporaries.
As the first solo exhibition - and book, and film - of the artist in the UK, an individual approach to curation is understandable. Philip Mould also selected the more transient, who ‘dipped in and out’ of the Set, a subtle hint at artists’ agency within the clique. We see the ‘Queen of Bohemia’ Nina Hamnett, ‘Britain’s Matisse’ Edward Wolfe, plus the ‘Artist Plantsman’ Cedric Morris. Wolfe’s works reflect the rising interest in Primitivism, whilst there’s more than a hint of Rousseau in Hamnett’s ‘Jungle Still Life’ (1950); there’s little space to speak of these complex art histories.
The paintings get more pastoral, perhaps conventional, the further we move from the exhibition space. Save for Jessica Dismorr’s startlingly modern portraits – themselves a rarity, only two of her vorticist paintings survive - and Gerard Leslie Brockhurst’s renderings in red chalk, the space is dominated by landscapes. More echoes of Charleston, the farmhouse, which looms in the background.
It’s a fitting end, for only Vanessa Bell matches Tomlin in his experimental use of colour. Much like Dismorr, many of her early works were destroyed during World War II, and few works from this period survive. This scarcity has only heightened their market value; for now, her flowers were the only stickered work sold. But not for long; Bloomsbury Stud will no doubt bring Stephen Tomlin to many more new buyers.
Bloomsbury Stud: The Art of Stephen Tomlin is showing at Philip Mould & Company until 11 August.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Bloomsbury Stud promises an alternative perspective on the Group through the eyes of its principal sculptor, Stephen Tomlin. To go beyond Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry – ‘Tommy’’s contemporaries, who populate the many floors of Philip Mould & Company - and the Omega Workshops (1913-1919) where they made their names.
It doesn’t. Much comes from Charleston, with the help of the Henry Moore Institute, if not private collections. We can’t escape the House where, in archive materials, we catch him ‘tottering up to bed’ at 2am. It even opens with his portrait by another, commissioned by Eddy Sackville-West, a hint perhaps that here too, we will only see Stephen Tomlin through others’ gaze.
But perhaps that’s the point of this spectacular exhibition. Tomlin is the very embodiment of Bloomsbury, his limited output evidence of a life lived ‘intensely and ferociously’. (In this, he shares something in common with his London forebears, the Rossettis, who don’t challenge our ideas about Victorian England, but rather reflect them back onto us.)
He dropped out of Oxford University after two terms, embraced new technologies, and indeed, played to the camera. Drugs and alcohol would leave him unable to practise for long periods of time, and cause his premature death.
What Tomlin’s collection lacks in number is more than made up in its diversity. From his early training under Frank Dobson, and naturalistic depictions on par with the portrait sculptures of Auguste Rodin, Tomlin moves into more expressionistic terrain.
It culminates in his late ceramics, a total realisation of the Bloomsbury Group’s values. These works are marked by their collaboration – designed by Tomlin, crafted by Phyllis Keyes, then painted by Duncan Grant – and likewise, the product of a complicated love triangle. Known for his ‘inexhaustible charisma and disarming good looks’, Tommy too had a voracious and gender-ambiguous sexual appetite. His ceramics speak to Dorothy Parker's famous remark that the Group ‘lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles’.
The midst is marked by the artist’s humour. We get a grumpy David Garnett, and a knobbly Duncan Grant. The cold gaze – and great privilege – of his father, Lord Tomlin, in bronze. Virginia Woolf, who so hated being ‘peered at’, here recast and reconsolidated in history by The Charleston Trust in the 1990s.
More excitingly, the American journalist Henrietta Bingham, coloured in a thoroughly modern red, her head cocked to the side in her typical interest. Statues cast for Diana Mitford, and sculptures of his sister, and his wife, all pay attention to the women in his milieu. As both a commercial gallery and exhibition space, Philip Mould & Company do well to sensitively curate under-represented artists and histories.
Yet Tomlin’s work is somewhat instrumentalised; he’s offered up as evidence of the moment of transition towards abstract sculpture of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, perhaps another nod to the Institutes whose funding helped make Bloomsbury Stud happen. But for an exhibition which seeks to restore the individual’s position in history, this reduction might be a step too far.
Take Dobson, whose multidisciplinary practice is well-curated in the main space, with his sculptures and paintings sat side-by-side. Tomlin, meanwhile, is placed in conversation with some seemingly unrelated paintings (bar a Grant/Tomlin duo of nudes in paint and bronze). Simon Bussy is over-selected, especially at the exhibition’s close, at the expense of his other contemporaries.
As the first solo exhibition - and book, and film - of the artist in the UK, an individual approach to curation is understandable. Philip Mould also selected the more transient, who ‘dipped in and out’ of the Set, a subtle hint at artists’ agency within the clique. We see the ‘Queen of Bohemia’ Nina Hamnett, ‘Britain’s Matisse’ Edward Wolfe, plus the ‘Artist Plantsman’ Cedric Morris. Wolfe’s works reflect the rising interest in Primitivism, whilst there’s more than a hint of Rousseau in Hamnett’s ‘Jungle Still Life’ (1950); there’s little space to speak of these complex art histories.
The paintings get more pastoral, perhaps conventional, the further we move from the exhibition space. Save for Jessica Dismorr’s startlingly modern portraits – themselves a rarity, only two of her vorticist paintings survive - and Gerard Leslie Brockhurst’s renderings in red chalk, the space is dominated by landscapes. More echoes of Charleston, the farmhouse, which looms in the background.
It’s a fitting end, for only Vanessa Bell matches Tomlin in his experimental use of colour. Much like Dismorr, many of her early works were destroyed during World War II, and few works from this period survive. This scarcity has only heightened their market value; for now, her flowers were the only stickered work sold. But not for long; Bloomsbury Stud will no doubt bring Stephen Tomlin to many more new buyers.
Bloomsbury Stud: The Art of Stephen Tomlin is showing at Philip Mould & Company until 11 August.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Bloomsbury Stud promises an alternative perspective on the Group through the eyes of its principal sculptor, Stephen Tomlin. To go beyond Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry – ‘Tommy’’s contemporaries, who populate the many floors of Philip Mould & Company - and the Omega Workshops (1913-1919) where they made their names.
It doesn’t. Much comes from Charleston, with the help of the Henry Moore Institute, if not private collections. We can’t escape the House where, in archive materials, we catch him ‘tottering up to bed’ at 2am. It even opens with his portrait by another, commissioned by Eddy Sackville-West, a hint perhaps that here too, we will only see Stephen Tomlin through others’ gaze.
But perhaps that’s the point of this spectacular exhibition. Tomlin is the very embodiment of Bloomsbury, his limited output evidence of a life lived ‘intensely and ferociously’. (In this, he shares something in common with his London forebears, the Rossettis, who don’t challenge our ideas about Victorian England, but rather reflect them back onto us.)
He dropped out of Oxford University after two terms, embraced new technologies, and indeed, played to the camera. Drugs and alcohol would leave him unable to practise for long periods of time, and cause his premature death.
What Tomlin’s collection lacks in number is more than made up in its diversity. From his early training under Frank Dobson, and naturalistic depictions on par with the portrait sculptures of Auguste Rodin, Tomlin moves into more expressionistic terrain.
It culminates in his late ceramics, a total realisation of the Bloomsbury Group’s values. These works are marked by their collaboration – designed by Tomlin, crafted by Phyllis Keyes, then painted by Duncan Grant – and likewise, the product of a complicated love triangle. Known for his ‘inexhaustible charisma and disarming good looks’, Tommy too had a voracious and gender-ambiguous sexual appetite. His ceramics speak to Dorothy Parker's famous remark that the Group ‘lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles’.
The midst is marked by the artist’s humour. We get a grumpy David Garnett, and a knobbly Duncan Grant. The cold gaze – and great privilege – of his father, Lord Tomlin, in bronze. Virginia Woolf, who so hated being ‘peered at’, here recast and reconsolidated in history by The Charleston Trust in the 1990s.
More excitingly, the American journalist Henrietta Bingham, coloured in a thoroughly modern red, her head cocked to the side in her typical interest. Statues cast for Diana Mitford, and sculptures of his sister, and his wife, all pay attention to the women in his milieu. As both a commercial gallery and exhibition space, Philip Mould & Company do well to sensitively curate under-represented artists and histories.
Yet Tomlin’s work is somewhat instrumentalised; he’s offered up as evidence of the moment of transition towards abstract sculpture of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, perhaps another nod to the Institutes whose funding helped make Bloomsbury Stud happen. But for an exhibition which seeks to restore the individual’s position in history, this reduction might be a step too far.
Take Dobson, whose multidisciplinary practice is well-curated in the main space, with his sculptures and paintings sat side-by-side. Tomlin, meanwhile, is placed in conversation with some seemingly unrelated paintings (bar a Grant/Tomlin duo of nudes in paint and bronze). Simon Bussy is over-selected, especially at the exhibition’s close, at the expense of his other contemporaries.
As the first solo exhibition - and book, and film - of the artist in the UK, an individual approach to curation is understandable. Philip Mould also selected the more transient, who ‘dipped in and out’ of the Set, a subtle hint at artists’ agency within the clique. We see the ‘Queen of Bohemia’ Nina Hamnett, ‘Britain’s Matisse’ Edward Wolfe, plus the ‘Artist Plantsman’ Cedric Morris. Wolfe’s works reflect the rising interest in Primitivism, whilst there’s more than a hint of Rousseau in Hamnett’s ‘Jungle Still Life’ (1950); there’s little space to speak of these complex art histories.
The paintings get more pastoral, perhaps conventional, the further we move from the exhibition space. Save for Jessica Dismorr’s startlingly modern portraits – themselves a rarity, only two of her vorticist paintings survive - and Gerard Leslie Brockhurst’s renderings in red chalk, the space is dominated by landscapes. More echoes of Charleston, the farmhouse, which looms in the background.
It’s a fitting end, for only Vanessa Bell matches Tomlin in his experimental use of colour. Much like Dismorr, many of her early works were destroyed during World War II, and few works from this period survive. This scarcity has only heightened their market value; for now, her flowers were the only stickered work sold. But not for long; Bloomsbury Stud will no doubt bring Stephen Tomlin to many more new buyers.
Bloomsbury Stud: The Art of Stephen Tomlin is showing at Philip Mould & Company until 11 August.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Bloomsbury Stud promises an alternative perspective on the Group through the eyes of its principal sculptor, Stephen Tomlin. To go beyond Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry – ‘Tommy’’s contemporaries, who populate the many floors of Philip Mould & Company - and the Omega Workshops (1913-1919) where they made their names.
It doesn’t. Much comes from Charleston, with the help of the Henry Moore Institute, if not private collections. We can’t escape the House where, in archive materials, we catch him ‘tottering up to bed’ at 2am. It even opens with his portrait by another, commissioned by Eddy Sackville-West, a hint perhaps that here too, we will only see Stephen Tomlin through others’ gaze.
But perhaps that’s the point of this spectacular exhibition. Tomlin is the very embodiment of Bloomsbury, his limited output evidence of a life lived ‘intensely and ferociously’. (In this, he shares something in common with his London forebears, the Rossettis, who don’t challenge our ideas about Victorian England, but rather reflect them back onto us.)
He dropped out of Oxford University after two terms, embraced new technologies, and indeed, played to the camera. Drugs and alcohol would leave him unable to practise for long periods of time, and cause his premature death.
What Tomlin’s collection lacks in number is more than made up in its diversity. From his early training under Frank Dobson, and naturalistic depictions on par with the portrait sculptures of Auguste Rodin, Tomlin moves into more expressionistic terrain.
It culminates in his late ceramics, a total realisation of the Bloomsbury Group’s values. These works are marked by their collaboration – designed by Tomlin, crafted by Phyllis Keyes, then painted by Duncan Grant – and likewise, the product of a complicated love triangle. Known for his ‘inexhaustible charisma and disarming good looks’, Tommy too had a voracious and gender-ambiguous sexual appetite. His ceramics speak to Dorothy Parker's famous remark that the Group ‘lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles’.
The midst is marked by the artist’s humour. We get a grumpy David Garnett, and a knobbly Duncan Grant. The cold gaze – and great privilege – of his father, Lord Tomlin, in bronze. Virginia Woolf, who so hated being ‘peered at’, here recast and reconsolidated in history by The Charleston Trust in the 1990s.
More excitingly, the American journalist Henrietta Bingham, coloured in a thoroughly modern red, her head cocked to the side in her typical interest. Statues cast for Diana Mitford, and sculptures of his sister, and his wife, all pay attention to the women in his milieu. As both a commercial gallery and exhibition space, Philip Mould & Company do well to sensitively curate under-represented artists and histories.
Yet Tomlin’s work is somewhat instrumentalised; he’s offered up as evidence of the moment of transition towards abstract sculpture of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, perhaps another nod to the Institutes whose funding helped make Bloomsbury Stud happen. But for an exhibition which seeks to restore the individual’s position in history, this reduction might be a step too far.
Take Dobson, whose multidisciplinary practice is well-curated in the main space, with his sculptures and paintings sat side-by-side. Tomlin, meanwhile, is placed in conversation with some seemingly unrelated paintings (bar a Grant/Tomlin duo of nudes in paint and bronze). Simon Bussy is over-selected, especially at the exhibition’s close, at the expense of his other contemporaries.
As the first solo exhibition - and book, and film - of the artist in the UK, an individual approach to curation is understandable. Philip Mould also selected the more transient, who ‘dipped in and out’ of the Set, a subtle hint at artists’ agency within the clique. We see the ‘Queen of Bohemia’ Nina Hamnett, ‘Britain’s Matisse’ Edward Wolfe, plus the ‘Artist Plantsman’ Cedric Morris. Wolfe’s works reflect the rising interest in Primitivism, whilst there’s more than a hint of Rousseau in Hamnett’s ‘Jungle Still Life’ (1950); there’s little space to speak of these complex art histories.
The paintings get more pastoral, perhaps conventional, the further we move from the exhibition space. Save for Jessica Dismorr’s startlingly modern portraits – themselves a rarity, only two of her vorticist paintings survive - and Gerard Leslie Brockhurst’s renderings in red chalk, the space is dominated by landscapes. More echoes of Charleston, the farmhouse, which looms in the background.
It’s a fitting end, for only Vanessa Bell matches Tomlin in his experimental use of colour. Much like Dismorr, many of her early works were destroyed during World War II, and few works from this period survive. This scarcity has only heightened their market value; for now, her flowers were the only stickered work sold. But not for long; Bloomsbury Stud will no doubt bring Stephen Tomlin to many more new buyers.
Bloomsbury Stud: The Art of Stephen Tomlin is showing at Philip Mould & Company until 11 August.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
