Bloomsbury picture returns home

A painting which hung in the house where the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant hosted gatherings of the Bloomsbury set is to be restored permanently to its former position.

One of Madame Villain's Sons, by Walter Sickert, has been bought by the trustees of Charleston House, near Lewes, Sussex. The work originally hung in Vanessa Bell's home in Bloomsbury, central London, but was then taken to Charleston in 1939, where her distinguished artistic and literary contemporaries met frequently over the next couple of decades.

After Bell, the sister of Virginia Woolf, died in 1961, the painting was bequeathed to another member of the family, who has not been named. When this owner decided to sell, the Charleston Trust, which renovated the house and opened it to the public during the Eighties, was given first option on a purchase. The work had already been on loan for the past four years.

The painting was finally secured with the help of a £14,000 grant from the National Art Collections Fund charity and money from the Resource V&A/Purchase Grant Fund.

Wendy Hitchmough, the curator, said: "Sickert influenced the work of both Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. They both admired his work."

The painting is a portrait of Maurice Villain, aged about five, who is thought to be the artist's illegitimate son. "It's very unusual, very powerful, very haunting; not a pretty picture," Dr Hitchmough said.