Arthur Clive Heward Bell (16 September 1881, East Shefford – 18 September 1964, London) was an English Art critic, associated with formalism and the Bloomsbury Group.

Bell was born in East Shefford, Berkshire, in 1881. He was the third of four children of William Heward Bell (1849–1927) and Hannah Taylor Cory (1850–1942), with an elder brother (Cory), an elder sister (Lorna Bell Acton), and a younger sister (Dorothy Bell Honey). His father was a civil engineer who built his fortune in the family coal mines in Wiltshire in England and Merthyr Tydfil in Wales, and the family was well off. They lived at Cleve House in Seend near Melksham in Wiltshire, which was adorned with Squire Bell's many hunting trophies.

He was educated at Marlborough and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history. In 1902 he received an Earl of Derby scholarship to study in Paris, where his interest in art originated. On his return to England, he moved to London, where he met and married the artist Vanessa Stephen — sister of Virginia Woolf — in 1907. Reportedly, Virginia flirted with Clive despite her sister's marriage to him.

Duncan James Corrowr Grant (21 January 1885 – 8 May 1978) was a British painter and designer of textiles, potterty and theatre sets and costumes. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group.

His father was Bartle Grant, a "poverty-stricken" major in the army, and much of his early childhood was spent in India and Burma. He was a grandson of Sir John Peter Grant, 12th Laird of Rothiemurchus, and the first cousin twice removed of John Grant, Lord Huntingtower, heir of the Earls of Dysart.

Grant was born on 21 January 1885 in Rothiemurchus at Aviemore in northern Scotland. He attended school in England from 1894, where he was educated at Hillbrow School, a preparatory school in Rugby, and St Paul's School, London. Grant showed little enthusiasm for studying but enjoyed art classes. He was encouraged by his art teacher and also his aunt Lady Strachey, who organised private drawing lessons for him. Eventually, he was allowed to follow his desire to become an artist, rather than join the army as his father wished, and he attended Westminster School of Art in 1902. He then studied art at the Slade School and in Italy and Paris.

Vanessa Bell (née Stephen; 30 May 1879 – 7 April 1961) was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury group, and the sister of Virginia Woolf.

Vanessa Stephen was the eldest daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Princep Duckworth (1846–1895). Her parents lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Westminster, London, and Vanessa lived there until 1904. She was educated at home by her parents in languages, mathematics and history, and took drawing lessons from Ebenezer Cook before she attended Sir Arthur Cope's art school in 1896, and then studied painting at the Royal Academy in 1901.

In later life, Stephen claimed that during her childhood she had been sexually molested by her half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth.

After the deaths of her mother in 1895 and her father in 1904, Vanessa sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and moved to Bloomsbury with Virginia and brothers Thoby (1880–1906) and Adrian (1883–1948), where they met and began socialising with the artists, writers and intellectuals who would come to form the Bloomsbury Group.

Frédéric François Chopin ( /ˈʃoʊpæn/; French pronunciation: [fʁe.de.ʁik ʃɔ.pɛ̃]; Polish: Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin, also phonetically Szopen; 22 February or 1 March 1810 – 17 October 1849) was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of French-Polish parentage. He is considered one of the great masters of Romantic music. Chopin was born in Żelazowa Wola, a village in the Duchy of Warsaw. A renowned child-prodigy pianist and composer, Chopin grew up in Warsaw and completed his music education there; he composed many mature works in Warsaw before leaving Poland in 1830 at age 20, shortly before the November 1830 Uprising.

Following the Russian suppression of the Uprising, he settled in Paris as part of Poland's Great Emigration. During the remaining 19 years of his life, Chopin gave only some 30 public performances, preferring the more intimate atmosphere of the salon; he supported himself by sales of his compositions and as a piano teacher. After some romantic dalliances with Polish women, including an abortive engagement, from 1837 to 1847 he carried on a relationship with the French writer Amantine Dupin (pen name "George Sand"). For most of his life, Chopin suffered from poor health; he died in Paris in 1849 at age 39.

William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry has led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". Although he lived in London his entire life except for three years spent in Felpham he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself".

Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of both the Romantic movement and "Pre-Romantic", for its large appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England – indeed, to all forms of organised religion – Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, as well as by such thinkers as Jakob Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg. Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th-century scholar William Rossetti characterised Blake as a "glorious luminary," and as "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors".