Roger Fry

Roger Eliot Fry
1928 self-portrait
Born	(1866-12-14)14 December 1866 London
Died	9 September 1934(1934-09-09) (aged 67) Royal Free Hospital, London
Nationality	English
Occupation	Artist and art critic
Known for	Member of the Bloomsbury Group

Roger Eliot Fry (14 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 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". 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.

Born in London, the son of the judge Edward Fry, he grew up in a wealthy Quaker family in Highgate. Fry was educated at Clifton College and King's College, Cambridge, where he was a member of the Cambridge Apostles. At Cambridge, Fry met many freethinking men who would shape the foundation of his interest in the arts. Alongside men like John McTaggart and Goldsworthy Loews Dickinson, Fry was a part of the elite Conversazione Society, which was also known as the Cambridge Apostles. 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.