Roger Eliot Fry (14 December 1866 – 9 September 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. He was described by the
art historian Kenneth Clark as "incomparably the greatest influence on taste since
Ruskin ... In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry". The taste Fry influenced was primarily that of the
Anglophone world, and his success lay largely in alerting an educated public to a compelling version of recent artistic developments of the Parisian
avant-garde.