Roger Fry & Post-Impressionism in London (1)

The Early Career of Roger Fry.

Fry was born into an upper-middle class Quaker family. Educated at Clifton (Bristol) and Cambridge (a first in Natural Sciences), he was destined for a career in medicine or the law like his father Sir Edward Fry. But at Cambridge Fry came into contact with art appreciators like Edward Carpenter and his fate was sealed as an artist, curator, and art critic and theorist. After leaving Cambridge, Fry declared to his father his intention of becoming a painter which led to a frosty relationship with his parents. This family tension was partially eased by travelling around Europe where Fry expanded his art knowledge by visiting galleries and generally soaking up the customs of places he visited. Unsurprisingly, he fell in love with renaissance art and his first book was on the Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini, published in 1899. Influenced greatly by the connoisseurship of Bernard Berenson, the sage of I Tatti, the book gives no indication of Fry’s future role as a proselytiser of modern art; though the analyses of form and colour in Bellini’s art signal the concepts that would be transmuted into such ideas as “significant form.” Marinated in the aestheticism of the late nineteenth-century, Giovanni Bellini shows Fry’s indebtedness to Ruskin, Berenson, Pater, Symonds, and Morelli who is widely considered the father of connoisseurship with his claims of identifying artists by studying such characteristics as physiognomy or drapery. The next significant achievement was for Fry to be offered a post of senior curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for which he turned down the Directorship of the National Gallery in London in 1906. There, for Pierpont-Morgan its Director, Fry acquired pictures such as portraits by Ingres previously in the collection of Degas whose collection was sold off after his death in 1917. Fry would eventually tire of Morgan’s mercurial moods and tyrannous ways and return to England where four years later Fry would stage at the Grafton Galleries in London of the most important public exhibitions of the twentieth- century- “Manet and the Post- Impressionists.”