Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury Opens at Tate Britain, with Their Studio Moved from Charleston

Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant worked side by side for more than fifty years, and on Thursday 12 November Tate Britain opens the show that puts the partnership at its centre. 'Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury' runs at Millbank to 11 April 2027. Tate's press release calls it the first major exhibition to chart the pair's relationship and artistic path, with more than 300 works across portraits, still lifes, landscapes and the furniture, ceramics and textiles they decorated.

The studio comes to London

The headline exhibit is a room. The studio the two artists shared at Charleston, their house in East Sussex, until 1939 is being moved to Tate Britain for the first time while Charleston undergoes conservation work, Tate says. The exhibition is organised with Charleston.

What is on the walls

• Vanessa Bell: Iceland Poppies (around 1908 to 1909), Studland Beach (around 1912), Still Life on Corner of a Mantelpiece (1914) and Interior with the Artist's Daughter (around 1935 to 1936), all named in Tate's press release.
• Duncan Grant: After Chardin (around 1906), Group at Asheham (1913), The Mantelpiece (1914) and The Hammock (1921 to 1923).
• Made together: the Famous Women Dinner Service of 1932 to 1934, fifty plates hand-painted on Wedgwood.

Tickets and times

Tate's listing gives adult tickets at £20 and concessions at £19; Tate Collective members aged 16 to 25 pay £5, and Tate Members go free. The gallery is open daily from 10am to 6pm, with a Late at Tate Britain on Friday 13 November, the show's first Friday, running to 10pm. The exhibition is on the lower floor, and Tate notes that one room contains sexually explicit content. The curators are Thomas Kennedy and Eliza Spindel, and the support named in the press release includes Kim Jones, Vice President of the Charleston Trust, and Farrow & Ball.

It opens in a busy week: the jazz festival starts the next day and the Lord Mayor's Show fills the City on the Saturday, both in What's on in London, 14–15 November. Across the river at Tate Britain's sister gallery, Tarek Atoui's Turbine Hall commission is free to April, and the rest of the season is in London culture, November and December 2026.

Bell and Grant painted the rooms they lived in as much as the people in them. If the show leaves you wanting to photograph a set built like one, our guide to building a set for a studio shoot covers it, and our daylight studio is lit from above through a circular light well; lights on a shoot are quoted separately, so please enquire about our lights.