Roger Eliot Fry

Roger Eliot Fry 1866-1934, English art critic and painter. A champion of modern French schools of art, he introduced Cézanne and the postimpressionists to England. From 1905 to 1910 he was curator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1933 he was made Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge. Interested in all eras, he consistently stressed the importance of analyzing the formal qualities within a work of art. His writings include Vision and Design (1920), Transformations (1926), Cézanne (1927), and an outstanding collection, posthumously published, Last Lectures (1939).

Bibliography: See his letters, ed. by D. Sutton (2 vol., 1973); biography by V. Woolf (1940).

Fry, Roger Eliot (1866–1934), art critic and painter, educated at King's College, Cambridge, where he became a member of the Apostles. He became art critic of the Athenaeum in 1901, helped to establish the Burlington Magazine in 1903, and was employed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1905–10). He organized two highly influential and controversial exhibitions of ‘Post-Impressionist’ paintings (a term he coined himself) at the Grafton Galleries in 1910 and 1912, and his collected essays (Vision and Design, 1920; Transformations, 1926) were also instrumental in spreading his enthusiasm for modern French painting. He was closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group, and his biography was written by V. Woolf (1940).