Charleston

Famous Women Dinner Service

Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant's playful yet ground-breaking artwork, celebrating famous women throughout history.

The Famous Women Dinner Service is a collection of 50 hand-decorated plates by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, celebrating famous women throughout history.

Commissioned by art historian and museum director Kenneth Clark in 1932, the dinner service was painted by the artists during their time at Charleston. After this the plates disappeared from public view and their whereabouts were unknown until very recently. There are 50 plates in the set, with the final two depicting Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, the only man in the series.

The portraits – subdivided into Women of Letters, Queens, Beauties, and Dancers and Actresses – include George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, 10th-century Japanese poet Murasaki and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (pictured with her spaniel Flush); the Queen of Sheba and Elizabeth I; Dante’s Beatrice and the pre-Raphaelite Elizabeth Siddal; Greta Garbo and Ellen Terry. Many of these women lead complex and scrutinised lives, resisting marriage in favour of unconventional domestic arrangements and individual freedom.

Across the collection, the women crafted identities which subverted social mores, using stage names and pseudonyms to join professional ranks or express alternative sexual identities. For Bell, it was “an illustration of women in different capacities” and a reflection of Bloomsbury’s new sexual politics. Hana Leaper, who has catalogued the plates since their rediscovery, considers The Famous Women Dinner Service a joyful sorority:

“These women might not have known one another and they might not have lived in the same epoch, but there’s an overlapping strength of character.”

The Famous Women Dinner Service was purchased by The Charleston Trust with the support of Piano Nobile Gallery and generous grants from the Heritage Lottery Memorial Fund and Art Fund, as well as donations from a circle of remarkable women.