Bloomsbury and the Omega Workshops

In the spirit of portraiture on plates I have recently been commissioned to paint some famous characters onto plates. The image here features my versions of Roger Fry and Clive Bell

Fry(1866 - 1934) was an English artist and art scholar, a curator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1906–10) and the Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge (1933). He coined the term “post-Impressionism” and introduced England to its principal artists through two London exhibitions( 1910-1912); he worked with Clive Bell to develop a new theory of art—formalism—to justify post-Impressionism (1913–14); and most lastingly he founded and ran the Omega Workshops (1913–19), whose decorative crafts helped heal England’s interior design of the “eczematous eruption” of Victorian ornament.

Fry was an intimate of the Bloomsbury circle from at least 1911 when he fell in love with Vanessa Bell during a tour of Turkey. Bell—Woolf’s older sister—was already married, and Fry had just admitted his wife of fifteen years to a mental hospital, but the Bloomsbury prejudice against monogamy encouraged their romance, which was genuine and lasting even if the affair was short. In 1926 longing for the domestic comforts of married life, Fry moved in with Helen Anrep, with whom he would remain until his death eight years later.