From Knitting Daily, an Interweave Press publication, which I receive via email.
Virginia Woolf (née Stephen)
NPG 5933. Virginia Woolf (née Stephen) by Vanessa Bell (née Stephen), 1912. Oil on board, 15 3⁄4 x 13 3⁄8 inches (400 x 340 mm). National Portrait Gallery, London.
In 1911 or 1912, when Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) painted this small portrait of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Virginia was working on the draft of what would be her first book, The Voyage Out, published in 1915.
The writer hated to pose and be looked at. The indistinctness of Virginia's features—the eyes and mouth are smudges—might suggest that Vanessa accommodated her sister's dislike of being scrutinized by neglecting to clearly delineate those features.
In fact, the simplified forms and strong colors typified Vanessa's style at the time. All elements of the painting are reduced to flat planes of color outlined in black, with virtually no modeling to suggest three-dimensionality. The colors are bold but not pure—mauves, greens, and blues, orange, turquoise, and gray-green—against which the pink of the knitting is shocking. It is likely that Vanessa experimented with these flat, strong colors after seeing paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cézanne in a small exhibition organized in 1910 by her then-lover, Roger Fry. Vanessa characterized her response to the exhibit as "a sudden liberation and encouragement to feel for oneself which were absolutely overwhelming."
It was well-known among her friends that Virginia was a knitter. After Virginia's death Dame Edith Sitwell reminisced: "I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter.'"
Virginia thought of knitting as therapy. Early in 1912 she reported to Leonard Woolf, before they were married and shortly after she had been in a rest home, that "Knitting is the saving of life." That salvation worked until 1941, when Virginia took her life.
—Fronia E. Wissman
