Vanessa Bell's charmingly odd Mrs. St. John Hutchinson is both an unflattering portrait and boasts several formal innovations which influenced later abstract artists like Mark Rothko and Hans Hofmann.

Working with other members of the Bloomsbury Group for Omega textiles allowed Bell to make original aesthetic experiments. Mrs. St. John Hutchinson marks the apex of Vanessa Bell's explorations in abstraction. Like the prose of her sister, Virginia Woolf, Bell's work pushes against and beyond the formal limitations of meaning and signification, finding just as much use in the background as in the foreground, insofar as the play of block colors inspired by her work for Omega textiles brings out the image in a striking way.

As part of the "Bloomsbury Group's reinvention of domestic life," Bell could collaboratively create artworks that depicted people of personal interest, such as her husband's mistresses (of which Mrs. St. John Hutchinson was one) and her own extramarital love interests, without major attempts to hide those biographical details from onlookers. While their experimental life certainly caused great stress and pain, it was a fascinating snapshot into a radical world for the public, and it allowed a rare opening into a woman's view of personal relationships.

Bloomsbury's significant contribution to the development of  abstract painting has not been adequately noted by critics for a number of reasons. First, the centrality of women to the Bloomsbury process was difficult for many male critics to acknowledge. On a more formal level, the kind of abstraction developed by mostly male artists decades after Mrs. St. John Hutchinson is less relational, removed from a figure and from the evidence of a relationship with a model. It also may be due to art history's relunctance to acknowledge the Bloomsbury Group as influential due to a, "profound involvement with the ethos of the decorative, and on the other [hand], from the short-lived nature of their engagement with non-objectivity. In 1916…[the Bloomsbury Group was] forced to shut down the workshop that had provided a crucial matrix for their experiments." After the Bloomsbury Group disbanded, Vanessa Bell returned to more representational painting.