The Bloomsbury painters bore me

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) claimed that nothing has really happened until it has been recorded, so this new exhibition at the NPG devoted to her life can only now be said to have happened — for here I am recording it. Of course it is a truism that an exhibition only exists while it is on. Afterwards it remains in (some of) the memories of those people who visited it, and in photographic records or a catalogue of the exhibits. Among the items that will linger in my memory of this show are the portrait by Julia Margaret Cameron of Sir John Herschel, mathematician and astronomer, looking like a distraught French revolutionary; the lithograph of Henry James by William Rothenstein; Sydney-Turner by Vanessa Bell (despite the poorly painted hands); Dora Carrington’s self-portrait; and a 1934 photograph of Virginia Woolf by Man Ray — one of the most lucid and beautiful images here.

This exhibition is very much a family affair. It begins with wonderful photographic portraits by Julia Margaret Cameron, Virginia Woolf’s great-aunt, then moves through the high days of the Bloomsbury Group, centred on Virginia and her husband Leonard Woolf, who together founded the Hogarth Press, which published many key Bloomsbury texts. Chief Hogarth Press designer was Vanessa Bell, Virginia’s sister, who also painted portraits of the main protagonists. Duncan Grant, predominantly homosexual, sometime lover of his cousin Lytton Strachey but also father of Vanessa’s daughter Angelica, was the other Bloomsbury court painter. The paintings of Bell and Grant dominate the show.

I must confess to being a little disappointed by the exhibition, which is well mannered to the point of being soporific. As a portrait of someone whose life was made up of dramatic lights and darks, the show goes along on rather too even a keel, in fact almost sedately.