It’s a fantasy dinner party for the ages: Queen Victoria seated between Pocahontas and Cleopatra; Catherine the Great sharing a table with Helen of Troy. This was the vision behind the so-called Famous Women Dinner Service, a collection of hand-painted china plates, created in 1932 by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and soon to be displayed in full as part of a major exhibition of Bell’s work.
“There’s a huge appetite for overlooked female artists,” says Anthony Spira, director of the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, where Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour will open later this month, with the dinner service taking centre stage. “It’s such an important work – one of the great works of feminist applied art.”
