Quentin Bell (1910 - 1996)

RA Collection: People and Organisations

English art historian and author. Bell was the son of Clive Bell and Vanessa Bell (née Stephen), and the nephew of Virginia Woolf (née Stephen). He was married to Anne Olivier Bell (née Popham). They had three children: Julian Bell, an artist and muralist; Cressida Bell, a notable textile designer; and Virginia Nicholson. Bell had an older brother, the poet Julian Heward Bell, who died in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. The writer and artist Angelica Garnett was his half-sister, and Amaryllis and Henrietta Garnett were his nieces.

Bell became a Lecturer in Art History at the Department of Fine Art, King’s College, University of Durham from 1952 to 1959, then became the first Professor of Fine Art at the University of Leeds from 1959 to 1967. In 1964 he was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University and, in 1965, Ferens Professor of Fine Art at the University of Hull. Bell was a Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Sussex from 1967 to 1975.

He sometimes worked as an artist - principally in ceramics - but for his career he was drawn to academia and to book-writing. He wrote a biography of his aunt, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, 2 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1972).