Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell (née Stephen; 30 May 1879 – 7 April 1961) was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and the sister of Virginia Woolf.

Vanessa Stephen was the elder daughter of the art critic and historian Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) and the philanthropist Julia Prinsep Duckworth (1846–1895), although she was her father's second child and her mother's fourth child. The family included her sister Virginia, brothers Thoby (1880–1906) and Adrian (1883–1948), half-sister Laura (1870–1945) whose mother was Leslie's first wife, Harriett Thackeray, half-sister Stella Duckworth, and half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth, who were Julia's children from her first marriage. Later in life, Virginia stated that, during their childhood, she and Vanessa had been sexually abused by George and Gerald.

The family lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate, London, and spent summers at Talland, the Cornwall house that would become the setting for Virginia's 1927 novel To the Lighthouse.