Perennial Bloomsbury

In 1918 ART CRITIC ROGER FRY transformed an overgrown walled garden filled with vegetables and fruit trees at Charleston, a redbrick farmhouse nestled in the East Sussex countryside, into a living work of art. The rural home had become a refuge for members of the effer-vescent Bloomsbury group, a creative coterie of artists, writers, and intellectuals who countered the prim-and-proper Edwardian-era culture with antibourgeois ideals and other unconventional pursuits. Case in point: fleeing London in 1916 as World War I raged, seeking farmwork so the pacifist circle’s male members could avoid military service and devote their lives to their craft. Vanessa Bell (sister of writer Virginia Woolf) and Duncan Grant, fervent Bloomsbury painters and primary residents of Charleston, cultivated their avant-garde artistic legacies while immersed in bohemian country life. Fry’s rectangular…