Bloomsbury Stud | Stephen Tomlin at Philip Mould

Stephen Tomlin at Ham Spray with Dora Carrington, Julia Strachey and Barbara Bragnel, courtesy of Philip Mould & Company

In 1923 the author David ‘Bunny’ Garnett introduced Stephen Tomlin to the Bloomsbury group. Tomlin, nicknamed ‘Tommy’, was a 22-year-old sculptor: intelligent, good looking and very, very charming. He was also bisexual and incurably promiscuous, hence the title of this exhibition at Philip Mould’s Pall Mall gallery (borrowed from a recent biography by Michael Bloch and Susan Fox, which has enjoyed a republication to coincide with the show). He reputedly racked up more bed-post notches than Duncan Grant, and that’s saying something.

Tomlin rewarded Garnett, in the same year, by fashioning a sculpture of him, in Ham Hill stone, which takes pride of place on a plinth in the middle room of Mould’s fine new show, arranged over the ground floor of his gallery. You might just recognise the work if you have visited Charleston in recent years: it was until recently languishing in a shrubbery overlooking a little-visited side garden, green with algae. ‘Bunny’ has been thoroughly cleaned and is splendidly lit; his expression, nevertheless, remains lugubrious.

Tomlin has largely been forgotten by the art world, but over the subsequent ten years he became, in effect, the Bloomsbury group’s semi-resident portrait sculptor, and this show includes a number of his major pieces: a magnificent 1924 bronze of Duncan Grant, looking dashingly handsome; a lead head of a heavy-lidded Edward Sackville West; a 1928 ceramic bust of his (long-suffering) wife Joan Tomlin, née Strachey; a 1929 plaster maquette of Lytton Strachey, and a 1990 bronze recasting of his (unfinished) 1931 portrait of Virginia Woolf. The novelist, it seems, hated posing for Tomlin in his ‘rat-ridden’ studio and gave up on her sittings before he had completed fashioning her likeness. Nonetheless it is generally regarded as Tomlin’s masterpiece: the plaster original sits on a chest of drawers in the sitting-room at Charleston.

Some of the pieces are on sale, including a pair of rather interesting ceramic nudes: but The Bloomsbury Stud is not, broadly speaking, a commercial show. Most of the sculptures, and the many paintings, photographs and artifacts that surround them (there’s a portrait of Tomlin by John Banting as well as works by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, inter alia) have been lent by private collectors and the Charleston Trust. It is bound to be very popular with Bloomsbury/Charleston aficionados. Tomlin, who died in 1937, his health ravaged by the effects of alcoholism, certainly deserves the recognition.

The show opened the same week that the Charleston Trust announced that they were opening a new art centre and gallery in the autumn, at Southover House in Lewes, five miles from their countryside HQ. Hopefully this will become the next resting place for Tomlin’s lugubrious bust of David Garnett: it seems unlikely that ‘Bunny’ will be returned to his semi-retirement in the farmhouse shrubbery.

Bloomsbury Stud: The Art of Stephen Tomlin, Philip Mould & Company, until August 11.