29 Facts About Roger Fry

Roger Eliot Fry was an English painter and critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group.

Roger Fry 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.

The taste Fry influenced was primarily that of the Anglophone world, and his success lay largely in alerting an educated public to a compelling version of recent artistic developments of the Parisian avant-garde.

Roger Fry's siblings included Joan Mary Fry, Agnes Fry and Margery Fry; Margery was principal of Somerville College, Oxford.

Roger Fry was educated at Clifton College and King's College, Cambridge, where he was a member of the Conversazione Society, alongside freethinking men who would shape the foundation of his interest in the arts, including John McTaggart and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson.

Roger Fry took over the care of their children with the help of his sister, Joan Roger Fry.

That same year, Roger Fry met the artists Vanessa Bell and her husband Clive Bell, and it was through them that he was introduced to the Bloomsbury Group.

In 1911, Roger Fry began an affair with Vanessa Bell, who was recovering from a miscarriage.

Roger Fry offered her the tenderness and care she felt was lacking from her husband.

Roger Fry became his emotional anchor for the rest of his life, although they never married.

Roger Fry died unexpectedly after a fall at his home in London.

Roger Fry's death caused great sorrow among the members of the Bloomsbury Group, who loved him for his generosity and warmth.

Roger Fry's ashes were placed in the vault of Kings College Chapel in Cambridge.

Roger Fry's 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'.

Roger Fry did not consider himself a great artist, "only a serious artist with some sensibility and taste".

Roger Fry considered Cowdray Park his best painting: "the best thing, in a way that I have done, the most complete at any rate".

In 1903 Roger Fry was involved in the foundation of The Burlington Magazine, the first scholarly periodical dedicated to art history in Britain.

Roger Fry was its co-editor between 1909 and 1919 but his influence on it continued until his death: Roger Fry was on the consultative committee of The Burlington since its beginnings and when he left the editorship, following a dispute with Cust and Adey regarding the editorial policy on modern art, he was able to use his influence on the committee to choose the successor he considered appropriate, Robert Rattray Tatlock.

In "An essay in Aesthetics", Roger Fry argues that the response felt from examining art comes from the form of an artwork; meaning that it is the use of line, mass, colour and overall design that invokes an emotional response.

Roger Fry was a born letter writer, able to communicate his observations on art or human beings to his friends and family.

In 1906 Roger Fry was appointed Curator of Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In November 1910, Roger Fry organised the exhibition 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists' at the Grafton Galleries, London.

Roger Fry followed it up with the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912.

Forster and Gertrude Stein, with whom Roger Fry shared a love of contemporary art, on one of her visits to London in the 1910s.

The London Artists' Association was set up in 1925 by Samuel Courtauld and John Maynard Keynes at the instigation of Roger Fry who was a friend of both men and advised them on their art collections.

In 1933, he was appointed the Slade Professor at Cambridge, a position that Roger Fry had much desired.

In September 1926 Roger Fry wrote a definitive essay on Seurat in The Dial.

Roger Fry spent ten years translating, "for his own pleasure", the poems of the symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme Between 1929 and 1934, the BBC released a series of twelve broadcasts wherein Roger Fry conveys his belief that art appreciation should begin with a sensibility to form as opposed to an inclination to praise art of high culture.

Roger Fry argues that an African sculpture or a Chinese vase is just as deserving of study as a Greek sculpture.