Roger Fry

Roger Fry was an English art critic and painter at the turn of the nineteenth century, most famous for coining the term “Post-Impressionism.” Fry’s early scholarly work focused on Old Masters, but after meeting Paul Cézanne in 1906, he published reviews on contemporaneous artists including Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent Van Gogh. Fry argued that these “Post-Impressionist” painters applied an Impressionist-like exploration of color to the structures and compositions of classical painting. Fry’s own work is largely characterized by experimental brushstroke and color. While he painted some still lives and abstracts, he focused on portraits, often of noteworthy friends like Edith Sitwell, Edward Carpenter, and sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Fry died unexpectedly in 1934 in England after a bad fall; Woolf wrote a loving biography of Fry in 1940.