‘For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself … All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself … Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.’ When Virginia Woolf wrote this of her character Mrs Ramsay in To the lighthouse (1927), Woolf could just as easily have been describing herself as she was painted by her sister in this work. Bell’s portrait captured a moment of quiet intimacy between the sisters, with Virginia knitting or sewing, quite unselfconsciously ‘being herself’.