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.

[2] 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.

Vanessa's sister, the author Virginia Woolf later wrote in her biography of Fry that "He had more knowledge and experience than the rest of us put together".

Shortly after their relocation to Guildford, Fry had a house called Durbins built to his own individual design in Chantry View Road, then on the edge of the town, overlooking the Surrey Hills.

Durbins was in a stripped-back classical style with large windows suggesting Dutch precedent and Fry regarded it as a 'genuine and honest piece of domestic architecture'.

He employed Lottie Hope and Nellie Boxall (in 1912) as his young servants until 1916 when he decided to rent the house and establish a trust for it.

They remained lifelong close friends, even though Fry's heart was broken in 1913 when Vanessa fell in love with Duncan Grant and decided to live permanently with him.

After short affairs with artists Nina Hamnett and Josette Coatmellec, Fry too found happiness with Helen Maitland Anrep.

Fry died after a fall at his home in London and his death caused great sorrow among the Bloomsbury Group, who loved him for his generosity and warmth.

Virginia Woolf was entrusted with writing his biography, a task she found difficult because his family asked her to omit certain key facts, his love affair with Vanessa Bell among them.

[12] His work was considered to give pleasure, 'communicating the delight of unexpected beauty and which tempers the spectator's sense to a keener consciousness of its presence'.

[16] Fry wrote for The Burlington from 1903 until his death: he published over two hundred pieces on eclectic subjects – from children's drawings to bushman art.

Desmond MacCarthy, the secretary of the exhibition stated that "by introducing the works of Cézanne, Matisse, Seurat, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Picasso to the British public, he smashed for a long time his reputation as an art critic.

It was an experimental design collective in which all the work was anonymous with everything that was produced in the workshops, bold decorative homeware ranging from rugs to ceramics and furniture to clothing, bearing only the Greek letter Ω (Omega).

'[25] As well as high society figures such as Lady Ottoline Morrell and Maud Cunard, other clients included Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, H.G.

[29] The London Artists' Association was set up in 1925 by Samuel Courtauld and John Maynard Keynes at the instigation of Roger Fry[30] who was a friend of both men and advised them on their art collections.