Vanessa Bell was the eldest daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Jackson. Her parents lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate, London, and Vanessa lived there until 1904. She was educated at home by her parents in languages, mathematics and history, and took drawing lessons from Ebenezer Cook before she attended Sir Arthur Cope's art school in 1896,and then studied painting at the Royal Academy in 1901.
After the deaths of her mother in 1895 and her father 1904, Vanessa sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and moved to Bloomsbury with her sister Virginia and brothers Thoby and Adrian, where they met and began socialising with the artists, writers and intellectuals who would come to form the Bloomsbury Group.
She married Clive Bell in 1911 and they had two sons, Julian (who died in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War at the age of 29), and Quentin . The two had an open marriage, both taking lovers throughout their life together. She had affairs with art critic Roger Fry, and with the painter Duncan Grant, with whom she had a daughter, Angelica in 1918, whom Clive Bell raised as his own daughter. Clive Bell took writer and patron of the arts Mary Hutchinson, amongst others, as his lover.
Vanessa, Clive, Duncan Grant and Duncan's lover David Garnett moved to the Sussex countryside shortly before the outbreak of First World War, and settled at Charleston Farmhouse near Firle, East Sussex, where she and Grant painted and worked on commissions for the Omega Workshops established by Roger Fry.
She is considered one of the major contributors to British portrait drawing and landscape art in the 20th century.
Was founder of the Friday Club in 1910 and took part in the Second Post Impressionist Exhibition. Held her first solo show at Independent Gallery in 1922. Showed at Leicester Galleries, NEAC, Lefevre and Redfern Galleries and elsewhere. Memorial shows held at Adam Gallery in 1961 and Arts Council in 1964. Retrospective exhibition, curated with Bloomsbury Gallery, was as part of Unione Donna's 7th Biennale in Ferrara, Italy in 1996.