Roger Eliot Fry NEAC (16 December 1866 – 9 September 1934) was an English painter and critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism. He was elected a member of the New English Art Club in 1892.

He was the first figure to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain, and emphasised the formal properties of paintings over the ‘associated ideas’ conjured in the viewer by their representational content. He was described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as "incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin ... In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry".

 

Life

Born in London, Fry grew up in a wealthy Quaker family in Highgate. He was educated at Clifton College and King's College, Cambridge. After taking a first in the Natural Science tripos, he went to Paris and then Italy to study art. Eventually he specialised in landscape painting.

 

In 1896, he married the artist Helen Coombe and they subsequently had two children. Helen soon became seriously mentally ill, and in 1910 was committed to a mental institution, where she remained for the rest of her life. Fry took over the care of their children with the help of his sister. That same year, Fry met the artists Vanessa Bell and her husband Clive Bell, and it was through them that he was introduced to the Bloomsbury Group. Vanessa's sister, the author Virginia Woolf later wrote in her biography of Fry that "he had more knowledge and experience than the rest of us put together".

 

After affairs with artists Vanessa Bell, Nina Hamnett and Josette Coatmellec, Fry found happiness with Helen Maitland Anrep. She became his emotional anchor for the rest of his life, although they never married.

 

Fry died unexpectedly after a fall at his home in London. His death caused great sorrow among the members of the Bloomsbury Group, who loved him for his generosity and warmth. Vanessa Bell decorated his casket before his ashes were placed in the vault of Kings College Chapel in Cambridge. Virginia Woolf was entrusted with writing his biography, published in 1940.

 

Artist Style

As a painter Fry was experimental (his work included a few abstracts), but his best pictures were straightforward naturalistic portraits, although he did not pretend to be a professional portrait painter. In his art, he explored his own sensations and gradually his own personal visions and attitudes asserted themselves. His work was considered to give pleasure, 'communicating the delight of unexpected beauty and which tempers the spectator's sense to a keener consciousness of its presence'. 

 

Fry did not consider himself a great artist, "only a serious artist with some sensibility and taste". He considered ‘Cowdray Park’ his best painting: "the best thing, in a way that I have done, the most complete at any rate".

 

Career 

In the 1900s, Fry started to teach art history at the Slade School of Fine Art. In 1903, Fry was involved in the foundation of The Burlington Magazine, the first scholarly periodical dedicated to art history in Britain. He was its co-editor between 1909 and 1919, but his influence on it continued until his death. Fry wrote over two hundred pieces on eclectic subjects – from children's drawings to bushman art, along with his growing interest in Post-Impressionism.

 

In 1906, Fry was appointed Curator of Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This was also the year in which he "discovered" the art of Paul Cézanne, the year the artist died, beginning the shift in his scholarly interests away from the Italian Old Masters and towards modern French art.

 

In November 1910, Fry organised the exhibition 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists'. This exhibition was the first to prominently feature Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse, and Van Gogh in England and brought their art to the public. Though the exhibition would eventually be widely celebrated, the sentiments at the time were much less favourable. This was due to the exhibition's selection of art that the public was unaccustomed to at the time.

 

In 1913, he founded the Omega Workshops, a design workshop based in London's Fitzroy Square, whose members included Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and other artists of the Bloomsbury Group. It was an experimental design collective in which all the work was anonymous with everything that was produced in the workshops, bold decorative homeware ranging from rugs to ceramics and furniture to clothing, bearing only the Greek letter Ω (Omega). 


As Fry told a journalist in 1913, ‘It is time that the spirit of fun was introduced into furniture and into fabrics. We have suffered too long from the dull and the stupidly serious.’ As well as high society figures such as Lady Ottoline Morrell and Maud Cunard, other clients included Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, W.B. Yeats, E.M. Forster and Gertrude Stein. 

 

His works can be seen in Tate Britain, the Ashmolean Museum, Leeds Art Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Manchester Art Gallery, Somerville College and the Courtauld Gallery.

 

A blue plaque was unveiled in Fitzroy Square on 20 May 2010.

 

This is an edited version of the Wikipedia entry for Roger Fry.

You can view a selection of Fry's paintings on the ArtUK website.

Header image: Roger Fry 'The Artist's Garden at Durbins, Guildford' (Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)