This story was published in 1999 and the exhibition is now closed

The Bloomsbury Group, the network of artists and writers who first came together in late 19th Century Cambridge University and became a major influence on 20th Century painting, design and literature, is the subject of the Tate Britain's major winter exhibition.

The Art of Bloomsbury opened on November 4 and runs until January 30, and centres on the work of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell at their Sussex home, Charleston, and Roger Fry, founder of the Omega Workshops.

But the group also included such important figures as the novelist Virginia Woolf, sister of Vanessa Bell; the writer Lytton Strachey, Grant's cousin; writer and critic Clive Bell, Vanessa's husband; John Maynard Keynes, the economist who was also a major patron not only of the Bloomsbury artists but of other important European painters; and the novelists E M Forster and Aldous Huxley.

Sponsored by the Prudential, the exhibition concentrates on the period 1910 to 1925 when the Bloomsbury artists were in the avant garde, introducing the work of such important Post-Impressionists as Cezanne, and the exhibition includes work by the artists they admired such as Picasso, Derain and Matisse.