Quentin Bell

Quentin Claudian Stephen Bell (19 August 1910 in London – 16 December 1996 in Sussex) was an 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 educated in London and at the Quaker Leighton Park School.

Principally an artist, as a potter, he was drawn to academia. Bell's biography of his famous aunt, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, 2 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1972), won not only the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, but also the Duff Cooper Prize and the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award. He also wrote several books on the Bloomsbury Group and Charleston Farmhouse.

He later became a lecturer in Art History at the Department of Fine Art, King's College, University of Durham from 1952 to 1959, then professor at Leeds University. In 1964 he was appointed Slade professor of fine art at Oxford University and, in 1965, Ferens professor of fine art at Hull University. He was a professor of art history and theory at the University of Sussex from 1967 to 1975.

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, the writer of Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden, Among the Bohemians and Singled Out.

His older brother was the poet Julian Heward Bell who died in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, aged 29. The writer Angelica Garnett was his half-sister.

Quentin Bell is buried in the churchyard of St. Peter's Church, West Firle, East Sussex.