Viva Lewes Issue #145 October 2018

Image courtesy of Piano Nobile
ON THIS MONTH: ART
Famous Women Dinner Service
The Charleston plates by Grant and Bell
The last time the Famous Women Dinner
Service was at Charleston was in 1933. Having
just completed the set, before shipping it to
its expectant owner, Vanessa Bell and Duncan
Grant asked if they could hold a tea party –
using the plates – for intrigued friends and
potential customers.
The 50 plates, hand-painted by Grant and
Bell on Wedgwood blanks, depict 49 historic
women and just one man: Grant himself.
“They were largely strong and independent
women who broke ground within their
own fields,” explains Darren Clarke, Head of
Collections at Charleston, “united by having
lived extraordinary or inspirational lives.”
The eclectic rollcall was divided into four
sets: Beauties; Dancers & Actresses; Queens,
and Women of Letters. George Eliot
features, as do Murasaki, Miss 1933, Greta
Garbo, Helen of Troy and Sappho. Each portrait
is surrounded by a distinctly Bloomsbury
border of cross hatching, swirls and circles.
The striking set would have been a real conversation
starter at any dinner party, and yet
the plates are like new, barely used at all.
“They were commissioned by Kenneth
Clark, who knew the artists already and was a
patron of their work. He was an art historian,
the youngest-ever director of the National
Gallery and a bright rising star of the British
art scene.
“There was very much a movement at the
time to encourage artists to design applied
art. Clark commissioned them to make a
140-piece dinner service, which originally
included serving dishes, pepper pots, soup
tureens and soup bowls. We don’t know what
became of the rest.”
Perhaps it wasn’t quite what Clark had had
in mind? “He wrote later that ‘it turned out
differently to what we had expected’, but
there was a lot of correspondence between
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