from Part I - Aesthetic Bloomsbury
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 October 2025
This chapter analyzes Bloomsbury’s contribution to modernist visual culture through a study of one of its less central figures, Mary Hutchinson. Hutchinson’s extensive archive provides a benchmark for Bloomsbury’s incursions into modernism. Her illustrated honeymoon journal was jointly written with her husband, St. John, in May 1910, six months before the “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” exhibition outraged London’s art world. The galleries and paintings that they sought out in Paris as affluent and fashionable tourists contrast with the dealers’ showrooms and exhibitions that Roger Fry visited that autumn to select paintings for his groundbreaking exhibition. The chapter explores Mary Hutchinson’s subsequent patronage of the Omega Workshops and of Bell and Grant as decorators. She wore Omega dresses and jewelry, took her meals at an Omega dining table using Omega plates and dishes, invited the Bloomsbury artists to paint in the boathouse studio at her home in Sussex, and encouraged their radical interior and decorative designs.
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