Roger Fry Blythburgh Estuary, 1892

About the artist

(This text appears on the back of the greeting card)

ROGER FRY (1866-1934)

Roger Fry, a key figure in the Bloomsbury group, was born in London in 1866 into a distinguished Quaker family. He gained a first in Natural Sciences at King's College, Cambridge, but decided to pursue an artistic career. In 1891 he went to Italy to study painting and in 1892 he spent two months at the Académie Julian in Paris. That same year that he embarked on a bicycling trip to Suffolk to see the tomb of Edward Fitzgerald at Woodbridge. During the trip he painted this beautifully composed view of the Blyth estuary, looking from a point west of Walberswick towards Blythburgh church.

Fry first met the artists Clive and Vanessa Bell in 1910. He subsequently became a regular member of the Bloomsbury group and the subject of Virginia Woolf's only biography. His two-year love affair with her sister Vanessa began in 1911 when he accompanied the Bells to Turkey. By this time he was regarded in England as the apostle of modern art. Two exhibitions he organised in London in 1910 and 1912 introduced the British public to the work of Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso and led to a revolution in artistic taste whose effects are still felt today.