Roger Eliot Fry (1866-1934)

Roger Eliot Fry was born on 16 December 1866, to Sir Edward Fry (1827–1918) and his wife Mariabella (1833–1930).  The second son of confectioner Joseph Fry (1795–1879), Edward was a successful judge and zoologist.

Francis Spalding, author of Roger Fry: Art and Life, characterises Roger Fry’s upbringing as being in a family which placed considerable value on work, austerity and faith. His family is notable among Quakers, as George Fox’s journals records that Roger Fry’s ancestor Zephaniah Fry (1658-1728) was arrested in 1683 for his involvement in a meeting of the Society of Friends.

Roger Fry’s earliest memories were of his first home, 6, The Grove, Highgate. In 1872, the family moved next door, to number 5, where the children could benefit from a larger garden. In 1875, they had their first visit to Failand House, a ‘summer home’ Roger’s parents had bought near Bristol.

Roger Fry went to Summerhill House, St George’s School, Ascot, at the age of 11, having been homeschooled until that point. Then, in 1881, he went to Clifton College, Bristol, where he became friends with John Ellis McTaggart.

His father encouraged him towards science. His mother enjoyed watercolours but what artistic influence he received as a child was generally from his wider family and his teachers. He and his siblings had annual visits to the Royal Academy and Charles Tomlinson, a family friend, took him to the National Gallery. His aunt Bessie’s husband was the Gothic Revival architect Alfred Waterhouse, who may have introduced him to some of the artistic and architectural tastes of the day.

In December 1884, Fry spent a few days in Cambridge, sitting his scholarship examinations. On 22 December, he wrote home, telling his mother he had won a Natural Science scholarship. Little must he have known the cultural differences he would face and how they would influence his intellectual development and career.

Fry matriculated in 1885 and moved into lodgings on Trumpington St with McTaggart, who joined Trinity College. This worried Fry’s mother, who was concerned that McTaggart’s influence would test Fry’s faith.

Fry quickly formed a new friendship, with C.R. Ashbee. Ashbee and Fry were very different but it is clear that the former influenced the latter. They shared an interest in Gothic architecture and would visit buildings like Wells Cathedral together, often sketching. Both read Ruskin, although Fry would later become more critical of his writings. Ashbee introduced Fry to Edward Carpenter and they visited his home, Millthorpe, together. Carpenter was outspoken about socialism, homosexuality and comradeship. As Fry’s letter to his mother (below) shows, he was pleasantly surprised by Carpenter, who he had expected to be a ‘somewhat rampant and sensational Bohemian’. Fry also attended a lecture by G.B. Shaw.  It may be Ashbee’s influence which led to Fry’s election to the Cambridge Fine Arts Society on 3 February 1886.

In 1887, Fry became friends with Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and Nathaniel Wedd. Dickinson proposed that Fry be elected a member of a secret society called the Apostles.

Ashbee was older than Fry and when the elder left Cambridge, Fry’s friendship with Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson became stronger. Dickinson was interested in political philosophy, not art, but Fry was used to philosophical conversations with McTaggart and all three were members of the secret society, the Apostles (for an exhibition on the Apostles, see the link at the bottom of this page).  Fry and Dickinson had a close friendship which lasted many years, but for Dickinson there was an attraction towards Fry which was not fully reciprocated.

In 1888, Fry designed the cover for the ‘Cambridge Fortnightly’.

Fry was able to take a more scholarly interest in art after J.H. Middleton was appointed Slade Professor at Cambridge. Although he was studying Natural Sciences, Fry learned about Italian art from him and from visits to the Fitzwilliam Museum.  When Fry gained a First, Middleton recommended that he stay in College and apply for a Fellowship, while also studying drawing. Fry wrote two fellowship dissertations but neither was successful. Although Fry was more keen to be an artist than a critic, Fry’s 1891 fellowship dissertation 'Some problems of phenomenology and its application to Greek art: a dissertation' hints at a meticulous theoretical approach to analysing art.

After graduating, it was agreed with his father, who had consulted the artist Briton Riviere and the family friend Herbert Marshall, that Fry should attend Francis Bate’s art school in the Applegarth Studio at Hammersmith. The teaching there was somewhat unconventional and far more focussed on the analysis of impressions than precise techniques with a pencil, perhaps due to Bates’ familiarity with French Impressionists. This training was not in a style favoured by the Royal Academy and Bates regularly exhibited with the New England Art Club (hereafter ‘N.E.A.C.’). Their ‘London Impressionists’ exhibition also included works by Whistler and Sickert, both of whom influenced Fry, although his tastes differed from theirs at times.

Fry’s parents moved to 1, Palace Houses, Bayswater, and Fry lived there after Cambridge. This cultural change led to some tension.

In 1891, his father paid for him to travel to Italy to see for himself what he’d learned from Middleton and the writings of Ruskin. Pip Hughes was his travel companion. Fry sketched while travelling and met artists like Giovanni Costa. He visited Rome, Sicily and Naples, then conducted a walking tour of Salerno, Amalfi and Sorrento, before settling in Florence. He then had another walking tour of Volterra, Prato, San Gimignano and Lucca, visiting Siena and Ravenna before finishing his trip in Venice.

While in Venice, he met the Widdrington family, of Newton Hall in Northumberland, forming a friendship with Idonea (Ida) Widdrington, which developed into romance. They were very different in character and when he proposed marriage, she responded “I love you too well to spoil your life, and I feel almost sure this would be the result.”

In spring 1892, Fry moved in with Robert Trevelyan, his friend from Cambridge and fellow Apostle. Fry kept a small studio at 29 Beaufort St, Chelsea. This saw the start of a period of artistic experimentation, rather than tuition.

He took two trips to Blythborough, in Suffolk, painting and re-painting landscapes, sometimes approaching an almost Post-Impressionist style. Concerned that his paintings shouldn’t be too literal, he wished to avoid ‘imitation’.

An N.E.A.C. exhibition in 1892 brought Fry further recognition as an artist. He started painting portraits, including sitters like Cecilia Widdrington (who he became close to despite their age difference) and Edward Carpenter. The latter was exhibited at the N.E.A.C. in 1894 and considered a great success.

In 1893, he attended evening classes run by Sickert at The Vale, in Chelsea. He also met William Rothenstein that year.

Helen Coombe was a painter and stained-glass window designer. She was born in Lee, Kent, on 23 March 1864, the eighth of twelve children of Joseph Coombe (a successful corn and flour merchant) and Laura Beaumont Coombe (née Russell). Her parents were English, but the family business had been conducted in Ireland. In 1881, when Helen was seventeen, she entered St John’s Wood Art Schools. The following December she was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools (RAS), where her achievements included winning a prize for the best drawing of a statue or a group. After leaving the RAS, she worked with several important figures in the Arts and Crafts Movement and pursued further studies at the National Art Training School.

Fry first saw Helen Coombe at his lodgings at 29 Beaufort Street on 27 May 1895. They were introduced by Trevelyan, who had initially intended to introduce her to Edward Marsh at 30 Bruton Street, off Berkeley Square, only to find Marsh (a fellow Apostle) was not at home. For Fry it was a case of love at first sight, but more than a year passed before Helen fell in love with him, her feelings eventually warmed by the advice he gave her when she was decorating Arnold Dolmetsch’s ‘Green’ harpsichord for display at the Arts and Crafts exhibition at the New Gallery in October 1896. They married on 3 December, at Great St Bartholomew’s in the City. Their honeymoon was an extended one, beginning in France and continuing in Algeria, Tunisia, and Sicily. Then they travelled through Italy, their main stops being in Naples, Rome, Florence, and Venice. They returned home in August 1897 by way of Switzerland and France. They had been away for eight months. Plans to settle down to work had to be abandoned in early September when Helen was diagnosed with lung trouble. On doctor’s advice, they went abroad for the winter. They chose to return to Italy for about six months, staying first in Ravello, then in Rome and Florence. They painted, studied and copied Italian art, and in Florence made the important acquaintance of Bernard Berenson.

In 1898, Fry gave a series of lectures on Venetian art for the Cambridge Extension Movement and was commissioned to write a ten thousand word monograph on Giovanni Bellini, for £25, by the Sign of the Unicorn publishers. Fry’s Giovanni Bellini was published in 1899. It included an acknowledgement of the influence and encouragement of Bernard Berenson, who had already discussed the notion of ‘tactile values’ in Venetian art.

In January 1910, a chance encounter with Vanessa Bell and her husband Clive Bell, at Cambridge Station, allowed what had been a faint acquaintance to develop into a friendship and they were later to visit him at Durbins. Fry being both an artist and a critic, he shared these common interests with Vanessa and Clive respectively, despite Fry being slightly older than them. Their worlds combined and he was introduced to Vanessa Bell’s Friday Club, which included Slade-trained painters. He first addressed the club on 21 February 1910. He was drawn into the Bloomsbury Group. Fry was spending two or three days in London, and the rest of the week in Durbins, where his sister Joan and staff looked after the house and children.

During the train journey Fry shared with the Bells, he told them of an idea for an exhibition on modern French artists. That October, it was mooted that the exhibition could take place in the Grafton Galleries the following January. Fry, Clive Bell and Desmond MacCarthy (the exhibition secretary) went to Paris to see art dealers and private collectors about artworks they might include in the exhibition. Fry had great success in Paris, after which MacCarthy visited Holland and Munich, where the work he got included a number of Van Goghs. He also wrote to C.J. Holmes, inviting him to join the exhibition committee. The exhibition, entitled ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ was opened on 8 November 1910 and ran until 15 January 1911. The exhibition included works by Manet, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Matisse. Individual works by these artists had been displayed to little effect in British galleries before, but never in this way. The exhibition shocked the art world and received bad reviews in the press.

The ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ exhibition greatly influenced the work of Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, the Bloomsbury artists. Shortly after it closed, Fry was offered the Directorship of the Tate Gallery but refused it.

Fry soon developed a short-lived romance with Lady Ottoline Morrell, who already knew of Post-Impressionist artists, had been on the Post-Impressionist exhibition committee and had got on well with Helen Fry. She had joined Fry et al in Paris when selecting works for the exhibition. The relationship ended when he went with the Bells, and H.T.J. Norton to Turkey, to see the Byzantine mosaics. They visited Istanbul and Bursa. They sketched and painted, but the trip took a tragic turn when Vanessa Bell suffered a miscarriage. He helped nurse her. Virginia, her sister, joined them afterwards, for the trip home. On their return, Fry fell out with Lady Ottoline. In July, Vanessa spent some time convalescing at Millmead Cottage in Guildford, where she and Fry spent much time together. Fry had various visitors to Durbins that summer, not least his fellow Bloomsbury artists. The group spent that September in Studland Bay.

Fry became increasingly influenced by Matisse, as well as the Turkish mosaics he had seen, experimenting in new techniques in his 1911 paintings of subjects such as Turkish landscapes and Studland Bay. Spalding likens the influence of mosaics on Bloomsbury art to stained glass and Vanessa Bell wrote to Fry describing it as not ‘painting in spots but considering the picture as patches.’

In the summer of 1911, Fry was invited to decorate the dining hall at the Borough Polytechnic. Fry invited Duncan Grant, Frederick Etchells, Bernard Adencey, Macdonald Gill and Albert Rothenstein to paint panels on the theme ‘London on Holiday’. Spalding notes that some of the panels were greatly influenced by Byzantine art, not least Grant’s ‘Bathers’, which is now in the Tate’s collection.

That autumn, Fry, Duncan Grant and Clive Bell went to France and saw an exhibition of Cubism, which introduced Fry to a different form of ‘geometrical simplification and classification of natural form’. This influence can be seen in his portrait of E.M. Forster, which hangs in King’s College.

In January 1912, Fry held a one-man show at the Alpine Club Gallery, featuring fifty-two of his works.

The Bloomsbury Group celebrated the armistice at a party hosted by Monty Sherman in rooms at the Adelphi, the walls of which were adorned with Matisse paintings. After this, Fry sold Durbins and moved to 7 Dalmeny Avenue, in Camden, where he set up a studio in the attic. His sister, Margery, moved there with him. He retained a studio in 18 Fitzroy Street, but moved from his two first floor rooms to a smaller studio above, which had previously been used by Nina Hamnett. In 1919, Picasso and Derain dined at Fry’s new home.

The British art world was changing. Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, with the art dealer Zborowski, put on an exhibition in 1919 which was considered the most important since the 1912 Post-Impressionist exhibition. Wyndham Lewis held a ‘Group X’ exhibition in March 1920, but that made less of an impression and the group did not survive long afterwards.

As the Omega Workshops closed, in June 1919, Fry returned to France, where Angela Lavelli was his companion. They visited Paris, Avignon and Aramon. Fry painted landscapes, as well as drawing studies of local people in his sketchbooks. Parting with Lavelli, Fry cycled to Les Baux, following Ottoline Morrell’s advice. He was unimpressed by the place but made new friends (including Marie Mauron) who took him to Paradou. He then painted at Martigues, Longesse and Cagnes. Having visited areas painted by Cézanne, he also visited the artist’s house, the Jas de Bouffan. After revisiting Paris, he returned to England that December. During his trip, he had met the artists Jean Marchand and Georges Rouault.

In 1920, Fry published Vision and Design, his famous book containing a selection of his best articles. In a later edition, he added an article entitled ‘Retrospect’, in which he described the development of his aesthetic belief. This re-evaluated his writings, such as ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’. Among the things which might have surprised readers at the time, such as the discussion of African sculpture.

In the spring of 1920, Fry made another trip to France. On his way to Vence, he stopped off in Paris, to hang paintings by himself, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell at Vildrac’s Gallery.  During this trip, he met the Russian artists Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova for the first time. Eighty-one of the paintings he created at this time were shown at the Independent Gallery in June. The exhibition was not well received. By late summer, he was painting again, in the north-west of France. There, he painted ‘Morbihan’, for the Salon d’Automne, which was more highly praised.

Fry was a great influence on the London Group, but this caused tension with the likes of C.R.W. Nevinson. Fry stood down from the jury and hanging committee at the end of 1920.

1921 saw the publication of Fry’s Twelve Original Woodcuts, by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press.

Throughout the 1920s, Fry regularly visited France, often seeing Charles and Marion Mauron. In 1921-2, Fry painted a portrait of Mela Muter, with whom he had an affair. This painting was followed by a number of portraits by Fry, with sitters including Lydia Lopokova and Bertrand Russell.

Fry had another exhibition at the Independent Gallery in April 1923, which coincided with a separate Augustus John exhibition. Critics judged his paintings as inconsistent with his writings, in terms of representation and expression. Later that year, he visited Spain and wrote A Sampler of Castile, writing about his impressions of Spain, not just its art. He sketched during his trip and illustrated the book himself. That year he also met Josette Coatmellec, from Le Havre, who he was fond of and grew to love but whose feelings for him were stronger. The following year, she shot herself on the cliff at Le Havre, while facing England. He attended her funeral, having designed the tombstone.

In the winter of 1924-5, Fry attended a party hosted by Vanessa Bell and spent much of the evening speaking to Helen Anrep. She was around 20 years his junior and married to Boris Anrep, the mosaicist. Despite having another lover himself, Boris Anrep felt jealous. She left him and went to Fry’s studio. Helen and Boris Anrep had met in Paris, where she had learnt to paint. Her relationship with Fry began with trips to a nearby Spanish restaurant. They appreciated the challenges their relationship would face. She did not leave Boris until a year after her relationship with Fry started.

In 1927, Fry was overlooked for the Slade Professorship at Oxford, for a second time, but was elected an Honorary Fellow of King’s College.

Fry published three books based on lectures on exhibitions held at the Royal Academy, from January 1927. The books were Flemish Art (1927), Characteristics of French Painting (1932) and Reflections on British Painting (1934).

In May 1928, Fry and Helen Anrep went on a two-month tour of Germany, visiting museums and although the trip did not change his negative view of German art, he spent time contemplating the difference between collecting policies in Britain and Germany.

In 1927, Fry had taken up lithography. His primary subject in this medium was church interiors and in 1930 he published Ten Architectural Lithographs. Helen Anrep’s purchase of Rodwell House, near Ipswich, in 1928, had enabled Fry to explore Suffolk’s churches.

He was highly popular as a lecturer, writer and even broadcaster, as he gave a series of talks for the radio, entitled ‘The Meaning of Pictures’, in 1929.

In 1930, Fry saw the Pissarro Centenary Exhibition and a Sisley show at Durand-Reul’s, during his visit to Paris. Around this time, he started to paint more portraits, sometimes by commission. His sitters included his mother, who died that year.

As well as his trips to France, he made further trips to Italy, in 1929, 1931 and 1934.

A retrospective of Fry’s work was shown in the Cooling Galleries, in association with the London Artists’ Association, in February 1931. In the same year, he acquired Mas d’Angirany, near St Rémy-de-Provence, a farmhouse which he shared with the Maurons.

Fry revised his aesthetic theory still further, delivering his ‘The Double Nature of Painting’, in French, in Brussels in the autumn of 1933. Whereas he had emphasised the importance of form over representation, he now drew an analogy with symphony (formal harmonies) and an opera (associated ideas and emotions).

Fry visited Greece, with his sister and Leonard and Virginia Woolf, in 1932. That year, he lost two friends, Lytton Strachey and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. Then he visited Spain with Gerald Brenan, in 1933.

In 1933, Fry was offered the Slade Professorship at Cambridge. He only lived long enough to deliver ten of his twenty-four lectures. Spalding noted that contrary to tradition, Fry used this position to explore aesthetics and the history of art in a much broader sense than his predecessors, building on his The Arts of Painting and Sculpture (1932). He assessed art in terms of ‘sensibility’ and ‘vitality’. His Slade lectures were posthumously published as Last Lectures (1939). His translations of Mallarmé’s poems were lost in a stolen suitcase in June 1933 and he was forced to reconstruct them with Charles Mauron, who co-edited them with Julian Bell, for publication after Fry’s death.

In July 1933, Fry hung a one-man show at Agnew’s, of his recent paintings at Greece, Spain, Morocco and France.

In September 1934, Fry slipped on a rug in his Bernard Street home, breaking his pelvis. Helen called Kenneth Clark, with whom Fry had intended to dine that evening, who rushed there and called a doctor. Fry was taken to the Royal Free Hospital, where he fell into a coma. He was visited by Margery, Pamela and Helen Anrep. He died on Sunday 9 September, after heart failure. He had a funeral the following Thursday and a memorial service at King’s College on 19 October. Fry’s ashes, which were in a casket designed by Vanessa Bell, were placed in the Chapel’s vault.

As Kenneth Clark noted,

In so far as taste can be changed by one man it was changed by Roger Fry.