English critic of art and literature. He studied at Cambridge, and in 1907 married painter Vanessa Stephen, sister of the writer Virginia Woolf. A prominent member of the London-based Bloomsbury group, his best-known works include Art (1914), in which he expounded the theory of ‘significant form’, and Since Cezanne (1922), in which he espoused modernism in art. Among later works are Landmarks in Nineteenth-Century Painting (1927), Proust (1929), and Old Friends (1956). His son, Quentin Bell (1910–96), wrote about his parents in Bloomsbury (1968).