Portrait of Stephen Tomlin

Stephen Tomlin, a sculptor of portrait heads and large-scale figures, was introduced to the Bloomsbury circle by David Garnett. His marriage to Julia Strachey, the writer and niece of Lytton in 1927 lasted for five years, she later married Lawrence Gowing. Richard Shone comments that Tomlin, 'was intelligent, charming, with a fertile imagination and a love of discussion which even Bloomsbury sometimes found exhausting. Lytton records tottering to bed at two in the morning at Charleston after a wide-ranging conversation on aesthetics. 'It's all this awful question of the content of a work of art' wrote Vanessa to Roger of the same occasion, when Lytton and Tommy (as Tomlin was known) were guests' (Bloomsbury Portraits Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and their circle, Oxford, 1976, p. 229-30). Tomlin produced portrait busts of Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant and Virginia Woolf.