Vanessa Bell was the centrepoint, the mother-figure, of the Bloomsbury group.

She was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and the elder sister of the novelist Virginia Woolf. When their parents died, the sisters lived in the Bloomsbury district of London, and they came into contact with those who would become their set.

From childhood, Vanessa was intent on being a painter. She trained at the Royal Academy schools where she was taught by John Singer Sargent.

Aged 28, in 1907 she married Clive Bell, part of the Bloomsbury group. They had two sons, Julian (1908-37, died in the Spanish Civil War), and Quentin (1910-96). In 1911, she had an affair with the critic and painter Roger Fry, with whom she set up the Omega Workshops. Both Vanessa and Clive openly had numerous other sexual partners, but they never divorced. Vanessa later embarked on an affair with the bisexual painter Duncan Grant, and their relationship lasted over fifty years. It was with Grant that she had a daughter, Angelica (b.1916, resides south of France). Angelica was raised as Clive Bell's child, and it wasn't until she was eighteen that she was told of her true parentage. She later married David Garnett, twenty-six years her senior, and who had been her father's lover at the time of her birth. They had four daughters. In her autobiography, Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood, she recalls the hurt her parents caused her.

Vanessa, Duncan and Garnett moved to the Sussex countryside shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, and in 1916 ending up in Charleston, a county home in Sussex that they completely redesigned in their own name but never actually owned.

After the First World War, she became a member of the London Group.

She continued thoughout her life to have extra-marital affairs with other men, but her relationship with Clive Bell remained amicable, and he became a permanent resident at Charleston in 1939.

She died in 1961.

• Charleston Farmhouse Exterior Photos