ROGER FRY (BRITISH 1866–1934)
THE DANCERS, c.1910
£35,200
Auction: 15 JANUARY 2025 FROM 10:00 GMT
Description
oil on board
Dimensions
71cm x 56cm (28in x 22in)
Provenance
Lady Ottoline Morrell;
Christie's New York, 1987;
Sandra Lummis Fine Art, London, from whom acquired by Bernard Kelly in November 1987.
Footnote
Roger Fry’s Dancers encapsulates both the artistic vision of the Bloomsbury Group and something too of their real-world attitudes to life, love and sex that set them so apart from most of Edwardian England.
This painting is steeped in Bloomsbury influences. There’s a certain Medievalism in its composition, like an illumination in a manuscript, that recalls William Morris, yet a louche sensibility and abstraction in its execution that is pure Post-Impressionism. And it was Fry, after all, who had just brought Modern French painting to London, to shocking effect, in the same year that this work was painted. He may well have known about Matisse’s The Dancers, painted for the Russian collector Sergei Schukin in 1909, with its similar circle of Bacchante, but Fry’s work speaks equally to Cezanne’s painting of bathers, or Gauguin’s Tahitian fantasies – albeit seemingly set in garden at Garsington Manor, home of society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, where all the bright young things of Bloomsbury would gather at weekend, both to dress up and (later) take off their clothes.
Indeed, one could easily imagine Fry turning this image into a fire-screen or cabinet door for his Omega Workshops, which he had set up precisely to blur the boundaries between art and life for this new generation of modernists and libertines, in that glorious – but short-lived – moment before the coming of the Great War.