Roger Fry

Roger Fry is Virginia Woolf's only biography, which she undertook to commemorate a devoted friend and one of the most renowned art critics of this century. She was, writes Herbert Read, his "perfect biographer."

Fry was a member of what Leonard Woolf called "the Old Bloomsbury Group." Educated to be a scientist, he became passionately interested in art while still at Cambridge, despite the disapproval of his Quaker parents, and took up a career as a painter, critic, and lecturer. He was employed by J. P. Morgan to buy for his private collection, and he served for a time as Curator of Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1910 he introduced the British public to the work of the Post-Impressionist painters, from Cezanne to Picasso, at a history-making exhibition. Two years later he opened the famous Omega Workshop in London, whose fabrics, pottery, and furniture influenced design in England and the United States. In his later years, Fry was celebrated as a lecturer. E. M. Forster viewed his death, in 1934, as a loss to civilization. He had, indeed, shaped the aesthetic taste of an entire generation.