The Memoir Club first met in 1920, some fifteen years after the original evening gatherings of friends at 46 Gordon Square which are usually taken to denote the beginning of Bloomsbury. It replaced the earlier Novel Club, which had met briefly in 1913. This portrait depicts eleven key figures associated with Bloomsbury, and is painted from mid-way through the life of the group. It depicts Duncan Grant, Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, David Garnett, Maynard and Lydia Keynes, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, Quentin Bell and E. M. Forster. On the wall behind are painted portraits of past members of the group: Virginia Woolf by Duncan Grant, 1911; Lytton Strachey by Duncan Grant, 1913; and Roger Fry by Vanessa Bell, c.1933. It thus includes David Garnett and members of the younger generation, such as Quentin Bell, who were later admitted.