“I’m very much excited at the prospect of doing the portrait”

Roger Fry (1866-1934) was an artist and critic. In 1910 he curated an exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in London that brought post-impressionism to the English public for the first time, featuring works by Cezanne, Gaugin, Manet, and Van Gogh. He was an influential member of the Bloomsbury group, and his death in 1934 was a shock to his fellow Bloomsberries, including Virginia Woolf who wrote a biography of him that was published in 1940.

Russell mentions Fry in passing in his Autobiography as a friend “whom I met in my early days in Cambridge and retained ever since.” In later years, their paths crossed in various locations, including Garsington, the home of Russell’s lover, Ottoline Morrell. Ottoline had assisted Fry with the 1910 exhibition, and they had a very brief affair just as Ottoline and Russell’s affair was beginning in 1911 (see letter from Ottoline). Fry soon directed his passions to the artist Vanessa Bell, the wife of his friend, Clive Bell, and was devastated by her later rejection. He would eventually find lasting happiness with Helen Maitland Anrep. As for Russell, by the time he received this letter from Fry in May 1922, he had been married to his second wife, Dora Black, for eight months.

In the letter, Fry thanks Russell for his “invitation” (presumably to paint his portrait) and adds “I’m very much excited at the prospect.” (This would not be the first time Fry would use his artistic skills for Russell—in leaner days, he had designed bookplates and even curtains for Russell and his first wife, Alys). Despite his excitement, Fry requests a postponement because of “my infernal indigestion.”  As Woolf noted in her biography: “He suffered from violent attacks of a mysterious internal pain.  But this also excited his curiosity.  It might be indigestion; on the other hand it might be cancer.  All theories must be given a trial, none must be dismissed offhand.  And so with indefatigable optimism, rather as a scientist on the track of a new discovery than as a patient seeking relief from pain, he went from doctor to doctor, tried cure after cure….”

In June 1922, Fry mentions in a letter to his mother that he is doing Russell’s portrait and that Russell has “one of the strangest faces you ever saw but very interesting.” Fry would end up completing two portraits of Russell by the end of 1922, or possibly in 1923, one of which is held today by the National Portrait Gallery. The Gallery’s website describes the portrait as being “notable for its clarity, directness and understatement.  These qualities seem appropriate for a likeness of a philosopher who admired the ‘supreme beauty’ of mathematics—‘cold and austere’.”  You can see a digital copy of the portrait on the National Portrait Gallery's website.

There are seven other letters from Fry in the Russell archives. They show that he was an avid reader and admirer of Russell’s work.

Sources: (1) Bertrand Russell. The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1872-1914 (Volume I). London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1967. (2) Virginia Woolf. Roger Fry, a biography. Macmillan, 1940. (3) Frances Spalding. Roger Fry: a life. University of California Press, 1980. (4) Miranda Seymour. Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1992. (4) Letter from Roger Fry to Lady Mariabella Fry (copy), 13 June 1922. (Bertrand Russell Archives, RA 596, Box 6.70).