Cézanne: A Study of His Development

Roger Eliot Fry (1866-1934) 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. Born on December 14, 1866 in London, 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. After taking a first in the Natural Science tripos, he went to Paris and then Italy to study art, eventually specialising in landscape painting. In 1896, Fry was introduced to the Bloomsbury Group. In the 1900s, Fry started to teach art history at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. In 1903 Fry was involved in the foundation of The Burlington Magazine, the first scholarly periodical dedicated to art history in Britain. He wrote for The Burlington, and was its co-editor (1909-1919), from 1903 until his death, publishing over two hundred pieces on eclectic subjects, from children’s drawings to bushman art. 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. In November 1910, Fry organised the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists (a term which he coined) at the Grafton Galleries, London, followed in 1912 with the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912. In 1913 he founded the Omega Workshops, a design workshop based in London’s Fitzroy Square. In 1933, he was appointed the Slade Professor at Cambridge.