Quentin Bell (1910–1996) was an art historian, novelist, potter, painter, sculptor and biographer of his aunt Virginia Woolf. His parents, Clive and Vanessa Bell, a critic and a painter, belonged to a milieu richly endowed with artistic and intellectual gifts. Quentin grew up in the aura of that milieu at Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, and he learned at first hand — as a frequent sitter for his mother and her partner Duncan Grant — how an artist goes to work. After a distinguished career as a university lecturer in art history, he settled with his family in the Sussex countryside and dedicated himself to the pottery studio, which was a lifelong pursuit. A noted humourist, his art is playfully alert with idiosyncratic imagery drawn from literary, historical and mythological sources.
