The second child of Leslie and Julia Stephen, Thoby was at the centre of the group of friends who first met at Cambridge, and afterwards at his 'Thursday evenings' in Bloomsbury.

Strikingly handsome, celebral and original, his friends and family were left wondering what he might have become, after his tragically early death from typhoid, contracted on holiday in Greece.

Perhaps in an attempt to resolve her speculations about her brother, Virginia Woolf based the central character of her novel Jacob's Room on Thoby.

Source:

• Charleston: An Artist's Home. Available at www.charleston.org.uk