Frances Spalding > Quotes

“it opens with a sense of satisfaction, of completeness, for his life seemed ‘to have been very unusually happy, and even successful: not that I have cut much figure in the world, but in that I have had what I really wanted - except war, which I hope to see before long’.56”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“This left them suspicious of the emotionally ill-bred for there was little chance of a genuine relationship forming if a person’s feelings were either false, exaggerated or uncontrolled.”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“his knack for catching human idiosyncrasies betrayed by pose, dress or movement. A biography allows us to travel with him through time and to gain some idea of how his many experiences stimulated and enriched his art.”
― Frances Spalding, Duncan Grant: A Biography

“one is obliged to think rather more seriously about it than one has done before. It really seems to matter so very little to oneself what one does.”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“Virginia until she turned purple with rage. Vanessa was equally affected by Virginia’s capacity to create suddenly an atmosphere of tense, thundery gloom.”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“Grands-Augustins. The rooms were bare except for a single, enormous canvas - Guernica - which was still in progress.”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“But it was as if one might say things one had always felt instead of trying to say things that other people told one to feel. Freedom was given one to be oneself”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“is the promise of continuity as opposed to decay, of meaning as opposed to senselessness, of value as opposed to waste.”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“In the eyes of other Anglo-Indians, he slid from grace when he married a Eurasian girl, who gave him four sons, one of whom died in the embrace of a bear.”
― Frances Spalding, Duncan Grant: A Biography

“showed a party of American and French ladies round Charleston in the year AD 2036. Janie acted the part of a very unpleasant French lady, more”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“She could not therefore accompany Clive on his day visit to Arezzo and was stung with envy on hearing his account of Piero della Francesca’s frescos based on the story of the True Cross. She greatly admired this artist and catches an echo”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“I never doubt for an instant that I am immensely the richer for all the feelings I have had and shall ever have about Julian.”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“When his wife had written him letter after letter in a pathetic, incoherent, child-like scrawl constantly begging him to take her home, he had formed, as he admitted, a callus to enable him to get through the inane tragedy of life. Unshackled by suffering from worldly concerns, he cared chiefly at this moment for art and had already decided to bring the Post-Impressionists to London.”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“Her life became increasingly constricted. Virginia later felt that at this period they ‘were always battling for that which was always being interfered with, muffled up, snatched away.”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“In the Post-Impressionists, Fry perceived a new expressiveness of design, a new search for structure, scale, interval and proportion.”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“Meeting this woman, later to organize Quaker relief in Germany after the 1914-18 war, as well as allotments for the unemployed during the slump, Vanessa saw only her limitations.”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“I am excited and thrilled and taken into another world as one only is by a great work of art.”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“where Maynard’s housekeeper Ruby Weller took the lead and a seemingly endless repertoire of songs was sung.”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“Roger, tacking remorselessly, ignored him. Eventually a breeze sprang up and carried them home. Vanessa, while silently resolving never to let her children sail in Roger’s company, thought the expedition typical of his determination to conquer - men, wind and tide.”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“in later years, when he entertained regularly at the Ivy restaurant and elsewhere, this made him an excellent host.”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“and that death and tragedy had once more put down his paw, after letting us run a few paces.”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“Vanessa blamed the elaborate proceedings undertaken for her son’s sake to ensure the death of the moth on her maternal instinct. Or so she told Virginia, when describing to her this incident which provided the initial inspiration for The Waves, originally entitled ‘The Moths’. ‘I wish you would write a book about the maternal instinct,’ she ended her letter. ‘In all my wide reading I haven’t yet found it properly explored ... I could tell you a great deal! Of course it is one of the worst of the passions, animal and remorseless. But how can one avoid yielding to these instincts if one happens to have them?”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“With ‘a brush, the one dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos’,26 they could return, whatever the stress and discord of daily life, to that continuously absorbing interior world in which the struggle to record observations of light, colour and form, however agonizingly difficult and intractable, resolves into an enduring happiness.”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“Clark left the artists free to decorate the service as they wished and found the result unexpected: there were forty-eight plates decorated with portraits of celebrated females, twelve queens, twelve writers and twelve beauties, including ‘Miss 1933’. (‘It ought to please the feminists,’ Vanessa announced.30”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“It left both sisters very well-mannered, supremely well trained in judging and (if they wished) maintaining limitations beyond which civilized intercourse did not go.”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“She now realized that her circle of friends, both old and new, was not conducive to painting. Therefore in the summer of 1905 she founded”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“The Waves, to ‘oppose to what is passing this ramrod of beaten steel’.”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

“My dearest Nessa, A line of sympathy and love from us both on the loss of your dear and beautiful boy with his pure and honourable feelings. It was fated that he should make his protest, as he was entitled to do, with his life, and one can say nothing.”
― Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist