Roger Fry - A Biography

Including the Essays 'The Art of Biography' & 'Roger Fry'

Virginia Woolf

• Publisher: Read & Co. Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781447469391
• eBook ISBN: 9781528792936
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

Roger Fry – A Biography by Virginia Woolf offers an intimate and insightful portrait of one of the most influential figures in the British art world, Roger Eliot Fry (1866–1934).

As a pioneering painter, critic, and a key member of the Bloomsbury Group, Fry was instrumental in introducing modern art to Britain, coining the term 'Post-Impressionism' and championing the works of artists like Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. In this biography, Woolf captures the essence of Fry's life and contributions, blending her deep understanding of art with her renowned literary style. Through Woolf's narrative, readers gain a deeper appreciation of Fry's impact on the art world, as well as his complex personality and relationships within the Bloomsbury Group.

This edition also includes Woolf's essay The Art of Biography, where she reflects on the challenges and nuances of writing a life story, providing further context to her approach in documenting Fry's life. Published by Read & Co. Great Essays, this classic biography is now republished with a specially commissioned biography of Woolf.

ROGER FRY

A BIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD: SCHOOL

I

“I lived the first six years of my life in the small eighteenth-century house at No. 6 The Grove, Highgate. This garden is still for me the imagined background for almost any garden scene that I read of in books”—thus Roger Fry began a fragment of autobiography. We may pause for a moment on the threshold of that small house at Highgate to ask what we can learn about him before he became conscious both of the serpent which bent down “from the fork of a peculiarly withered and soot begrimed old apple tree”, and of the “large red oriental poppies which by some blessed chance” grew in his “private and particular garden”.

He was born on 14th December 1866, the second son of Edward Fry and of Mariabella, the daughter of Thomas Hodgkin. Both were Quakers. Behind Roger on his father’s side were eight recorded generations of Frys, beginning with that Zephaniah, the first to become a Quaker, in whose house in Wiltshire George Fox held “a very blessed meeting, and quiet, though the officers had purposed to break it up, and were on their way in order thereunto. But before they got to it, word was brought them, that there was a house just broken up by thieves, and they were required to go back again with speed. . . .” That was in 1663, and from that time onwards the Frys held the Quaker faith and observed certain marked peculiarities both of opinion and of dress, for which, in the early days, they endured considerable persecution. The first of them, Zephaniah, was in prison for three months for refusing to take the oath of allegiance. As time went on the persecution weakened; they had nothing worse to suffer than the “sneers and coldness of their own class”; but whatever they suffered they abode by their convictions consistently. The injunction “Swear not at all” meant that no oaths could be taken, and therefore many professions were shut to them. Some of the Frys added additional scruples of their own. Even the profession of medicine was distasteful to Joseph, the grandson of Zephaniah, because “he could not feel easy to accept payment for the water contained in the medicines he dispensed”. Such scruples—“miserable questions of dress and address”, as Edward Fry came to call them—tormented the weaker spirits and laid them open to ridicule. They vacillated between the two worlds. A coat-of-arms was first engraved and then scratched out; fine linen was ordered and then cut up; one John Eliot fretted himself into the conviction that he ought to outrage eighteenth-century convention by growing a beard. The arts as well as the professions were outside the pale. Not only was the theatre forbidden, but music and dancing; and though “drawing and water-colour painting were tolerated or encouraged”, the encouragement was tepid, for, with some notable exceptions, even in the nineteenth century almost the only picture to be found in a Quaker household was an engraving of Penn’s Treaty with the Indians—that detestable picture, as Roger Fry called it later.

Undoubtedly the Quaker society, as one of its members writes, was “very narrow in outlook and bounded in interests; very bourgeois as to its members”. But the canalising of so much energy within such narrow limits bore remarkable fruit. The story of Joseph Fry is typical of the story of many of the Frys. Since, owing to his scruples, the medical profession was shut to him, “he took to business occupations, and established, or took part in establishing, five considerable businesses which probably proved far more remunerative than the profession which he had renounced for conscience sake”. Hence there came about a curious anomaly; the most unworldly of people were yet abundantly blessed with the world’s goods. The tradesman who lived over his shop in Bristol or in Bartholomew Close was at the same time a country gentleman owning many acres in Cornwall or in Wiltshire. But he was a country gentleman of a peculiar kind. He was a squire who refused to pay tithes; who refused to hunt or to shoot; who dressed differently from his neighbours, and, if he married, married a Quaker like himself. Thus the Frys and the Eliots, the Howards and the Hodgkins not only lived differently and spoke differently and dressed differently from other people, but these differences were enforced by innumerable inter-marriages. Any Quaker who married “outside the society” was disowned. For generation after generation therefore the sons of one Quaker family married the daughters of another. Mariabella Hodgkin, Roger Fry’s mother, came of precisely the same physical and spiritual stock as her husband Edward Fry. She was descended from the Eliots who, like the Frys, had been Quakers since the seventeenth century. They too had eschewed public life and had accumulated considerable wealth, first as merchants at Falmouth “exporting pilchards and tin to Venice”, and later in London, where they owned a large family mansion in Bartholomew Close. The Eliots married with the Howards, who were tinplate manufacturers and Quakers also. And it was through the marriage of Luke Howard, the son of Robert, the tinplate manufacturer of Old Street, with Mariabella Eliot that the only two names among all the names in the ample family chronicle in which their descendant Roger Fry showed any interest came into the family. His great-grandfather, Luke Howard (1772-1864), was a man of “brilliant but rather erratic genius” who, like so many of the Friends, being denied other outlet, turned his attention to science. He was the author of an essay “proposing a classification and nomenclature of the clouds” which attracted the attention of Goethe, who not only wrote a poem on the subject but entered into communication with the author. Mariabella Hodgkin could remember her grandfather. He seemed, she writes, “always to be thinking of something very far away. . . . He . . . would stand for a long time at the window gazing at the sky with his dreamy placid look”, and, like some of his descendants, he was “deft in the use of tools” and taught his grandchildren in his own workshop how to handle air pumps and electrical machines. Roger Fry left his copy of the family history uncut, but he admitted that he wished he knew more of this ingenious ancestor whose gift for setting other people’s minds to work by speculations which were not “entirely confirmed by subsequent observation” suggests some affinity of temperament as well as of blood. The other name that took Roger Fry’s fancy, though for different reasons, was his mother’s—Mariabella. It was first given in the seventeenth century to the daughter of a Blake who married a Farnborough, whose daughter married a Briggins, whose daughter married an Eliot. It was a name with a certain mystery attached to it, for it was “evidently Italian or Spanish in its origin”, and Roger Fry, who took no interest whatever in the Eliots and their possible connection with the Eliots of Port St Germans, or in the Westons and their possible but improbable descent from Lord Weston, Earl of Portland, liked to think that his ancestress, the first Mariabella, owed her name to some connection with the South. He hoped that the quiet and respectable blood of his innumerable Quaker forefathers was dashed with some more fiery strain. But it was only a hope. No scandal in the Eliot family had been recorded for more than two hundred years. His mother, Mariabella Hodgkin, the seventh to bear that name, was a pure-bred Quaker like the rest; and it was in the Friends’ Meeting House at Lewes on a cloudless spring day in April 1859 that Edward Fry married her and brought her back to the small house in Highgate.

That house,[1] Edward Fry wrote, “looked over Miss Burdett-Coutts’ garden of Holly Lodge beyond to the roofs of London . . . .a little garden, with a copper beech in one corner, sloped down from the house to the trees of our great neighbour, and was very dear to us in those early days. It was a little plot

Not wholly in the busy world nor quite
Beyond it.

And murmurs from the great city below us often stole up the hill and reminded us of how near we were to the great heart of things.” It was in that house that his nine children were born; and it was in that garden that his son Roger felt his first passion and suffered his first great disillusion.

This garden [Roger Fry wrote] is still for me the imagined background for almost any garden scene that I read of in books. The serpent still bends down to Eve from the fork of a peculiarly withered and soot begrimed old apple tree which stuck out of the lawn. And various other scenes of seduction seem to me to have taken place within its modest suburban precincts. But it was also the scene of two great emotional experiences, my first passion and my first great disillusion. My first passion was for a bushy plant of large red oriental poppies which by some blessed chance was actually within the limits of the square yard of bed which had been allotted to me as my private and particular garden. The plants I bought and glued into the ground with mud, made with a watering pot and garden mould—the seeds which I sowed never came up to my expectations, generally in fact refused to grow at all but the poppies were always better than my wildest dreams. Their red was always redder than any thing I could imagine when I looked away from them. I had a general passion for red which when I also developed a romantic attachment for locomotives led me to believe that I had once seen a “pure red engine”. Anyhow the poppy plant was the object of a much more sincere worship than I was at all able to give to “gentle Jesus” and I almost think of a greater affection than I felt for anyone except my father. I remember on one occasion the plant was full of fat green flower buds with little pieces of crumpled scarlet silk showing through the cracks between the sepals. A few were already in flower. I conceived that nothing in the world could be more exciting than to see the flower suddenly burst its green case and unfold its immense cup of red. I supposed this happened suddenly and that it only required patience to be able to watch the event. One morning I stood watching a promising bud for what seemed hours but nothing happened and I got tired, so I ran indoors very hurriedly for fear of getting back too late and got a stool on which I proceeded to keep watch for what seemed an eternity and was I daresay half an hour. I was discovered ultimately by an elder sister and duly laughed at by her and when the story was known by all the grown-ups, for all passions even for red poppies leave one open to ridicule.

The other event was more tragic. It was in fact the horrible discovery that justice is not supreme, that innocence is no protection. It was again a summer morning and I was leaning against my mother’s knee as she sat on a low wicker chair and instructed me in the rudiments of botany. In order to illustrate some point she told me to fetch her one of the buds of my adored poppy plant or at least that was what I understood her to say. I had already been drilled to implicit obedience and though it seemed to me an almost sacrilegious act I accomplished it. Apparently . . .

There the fragment stops. But the sequel is known—he picked the poppy and was gravely reproved by his mother for doing so. The disillusionment was great. For if he was credulous and passionate, he was also “drilled to implicit obedience”; and the person who had first exacted his obedience and then punished him for it was his mother. The shock of that confused experience was still tingling fifty years later. It was akin to many of the same kind that were to follow; but the fact that his “first great disillusionment” was connected with his mother perhaps explains the sharpness and the permanence of the impression. Lady Fry exercised upon that very impressionable and sensitive, yet also very logical and independent, boy an influence that lasted long after she had ceased to teach him botany. As her photographs show, she was a woman of great personal impressiveness; handsome of feature, firm of lip, vigorous of body. Tradition has it that she was a high-spirited girl, fond of gaiety, and capable of attracting admiration in spite of the Quaker sobriety of life and of the Quaker dress which was still the common wear of the Hodgkins in her youth. Late in life—she lived to be ninety-seven—she made out a list of “Things that were not—: Things that were: when I was a little child”. It is an instructive list. Among the things that were not, she counted lucifer matches; hot-water bottles; night-lights; Christmas trees; hoardings with posters; Japanese anemones; spring mattresses; and gas for teeth extraction. Among the things that were, she counted flint and steel; rushlights; prunes and senna; clogs and pattens; beadles and chariots; tippets and sleeves (in one); snuff-boxes and Chartists. She drew no conclusion, and it is left for us to infer that there were more denials than delights, more austerities than luxuries in the life of the little Quaker girl. An anecdote that she tells of her childhood bears out this impression. “On this occasion [an illness at the age of four] a kind Uncle brought me a box of lovely tea-things (I have them still) and brought them up to me as I sat in my crib. Though no doubt longing to have them, I resolutely and firmly shut my eyes, and in spite of cajolements and commands, refused to open them. My Uncle departed, the tea-things were no doubt taken away and I was left under the ban of displeasure. This was one of those secret inhibitions which are part of childhood, and arise probably from vehement shyness.” And there were other inhibitions that were peculiar to a Quaker childhood. To the end of her life she remembered how her father had ordered the tight sleeves that were fashionable to be cut from her dress and large sleeves that were out of fashion to be inserted, and how, as she walked along the road, the street boys had jeered “Quack! Quack!” at her. Very shy and sensitive, the effect of such an upbringing was permanent. Always she seemed to live between two worlds, and to belong to neither. Thus it was no wonder that when her second son was a child, her eyes remained firmly yet uneasily shut to many of the sights that were to him objects “of a much more sincere worship than I was at all able to give to ‘gentle Jesus’”—red poppies, red engines, and green flower-buds with little pieces of scarlet silk showing through the cracks between the sepals. And yet he respected her; and was “drilled to implicit obedience”.

The garden in which he received this first lesson in the rudiments of botany was surrounded by other gardens. Below it stretched Ken Wood, then belonging to Lord Mansfield; and Ken Wood merged in the heights of Hampstead. Highgate itself was a village; and though, as Sir Edward Fry said, the murmur of London stole up the hill, access to the great city was difficult. Only “an occasional omnibus” connected the two. The “villagers” were still isolated and exalted. They still considered themselves a race apart. When Roger was a child, the old hair-dresser who had cut Coleridge’s hair was still cutting hair and recalling the poet’s loquacity—“He did talk!” he would say, but was unable to say what the poet had talked about. ...

Table of contents

• Virginia Woolf
• THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
• ROGER FRY
• ROGER FRY
• APPENDIX