*VANESSA BELL (1879-1961) 'Desmond MacCarthy at Charleston'

*VANESSA BELL (1879-1961) 'Desmond MacCarthy at Charleston' the sitter depicted half-length, reading in an interior, the vivid colours of Charleston behind him, monogrammed lower right, oil on board, 60cm x 50cm Sir Charles Otto Desmond MacCarthy FRSL (20 May 1877 - 7 June 1952) was the foremost literary and dramatic critic of his day. MacCarthy studied first at Eton, then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met and befriended Lytton Strachey. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, the intellectual secret society, from 1896. In 1906 he married Mary 'Molly' Warre-Cornish, herself a writer, and a lifelong friend of Vanessa Bell. It was Molly who instigated the Memoir Club in 1920 at which its members, after dining together, read short autobiographical papers, some of which are invaluable records of aspects of early Bloomsbury, particularly those by John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf. A work by Bell of the members of the Memoir Club, including both Desmond and Molly MacCarthy is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, as is a portrait of Desmond MacCarthy by Duncan Grant.