Bloomsbury was as much an idea about a new way of living as it was a specific group of artists – indeed its central figures were not just the painters Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Dora Carrington, but also their patrons, lovers and a number of writers including E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf.

The Bloomsbury painters were inspired both by the bright palette and simplified forms of French Post-Impressionism, which Fry had been influential in bringing to London in 1910, and by Cubism and its embrace of the Primitive. The Group’s radical aesthetic insisted everything should be beautiful, but also be expressive of the modern era: very much an update (and an antithesis) of William Morris. However, like Morris, they founded a fully-functioning workshop – Omega – to bring this idea to a wider audience through furniture and textile design and household objects. The Omega Workshop’s unmistakeable style – bright, geometric, primitive – was to become highly influential on art and design in the 20s and 30s.