Poinsettias is one of the finest examples of Roger Fry’s work to appear on the market in recent years. Painted on a large scale and complete with its original hand-painted frame, it is one of only a small number of his celebrated wartime still-life works to remain in private hands.[1]

Roger Fry was a pioneering force in early 20th-century British art. The Post-Impressionist exhibitions he staged in London in 1910 and 1912 introduced modern art to a new generation and changed the course of art in Britain. Fry possessed a rare combination of a creative, yet intellectual mind, and his writings, exhibitions, and art established him as a leading creative and commentator.

The present work demonstrates his engagement with the formal challenges of still life painting, drawing on Paul Cézanne’s principles of compositional clarity and structural design. As Fry later reflected in his 1927 monograph on Cézanne, he maintained that still life was the arena where ‘we frequently catch the purest self-revelation of the artist.’[2] Nowhere did he stake this claim more effectively than in his 1917 exhibition of flowerpieces at the Carfax Gallery. The show was well received, with the artist Randolph Schwabe commenting in his review for the Burlington Magazine: ‘it is not exceeding a reasonable limit to characterise these twenty paintings as serious and thoughtful work, full of feeling for the possible dignity of this branch of still-life, and showing appreciation of colour, growth and pictorial structure, expressed without the tedium of overliteral representation. The larger pictures are perhaps the best; in particular Irises, Poinsettias, and Lily’.[3]

[1] Other important still-life works now held in public collections, include The Blue Bottle (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), Still Life with Biscuit Tin and Pots (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and The Madonna Lily (Bristol City Art Gallery). We are grateful to Richard Shone for providing this information.

[2] Roger Fry, (1927) Cézanne: A Study of His Development. London: Hogarth Press, p. 41

[3] Walter Sickert, ‘Flowerpieces by Roger Fry; Carfax and Co.’, The Burlington Magazine, 1918, 32, p.38