Roger Fry - Vision and Design

A style named after Jeanne Bcu, comtesse du Barry (174393). patroness of the arts.

Fry is probably thinking of his former employer John Pierpont Morgan (18371913), whose financial empire was matched only by his huge collection of art works.

Salimbenis chronicle: G.G. Coulton, From St Francis to Dante, a translation of all that is of interest in the chronicle of the Franciscan Salimbene, 122188 (1906).

St Bernard of Clairvaux (10901153).

Paray le Monial is in east central France in the department of Sane-et-Loire. The Benedictine priory was founded in the tenth century.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (15731610).

Jacques-Louis David (17481825).

Whistlers Ten OClock Lecture was given in London on 20 Feb. 1885 and published in his The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890). Whistler tried to establish the autonomy of art and nature and to defend himself against the critical abuse of Ruskin. In 1878 Ruskin and Whistler had gone to law about Ruskins remarks in Fors Glavigera which denigrated Whistlers painting The Falling Rocket.

William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (Edinburgh, 1899).

John Singer Sargent (18561925), painter of highly sophisticated aristocratic portraits.

In A Manual of Oil Painting (1886), John Collier wrote: This representation of natural objects by means of pigments on a flat surface is a very definite matter and most people are competent to judge of the truth or falsehood of such a representation ... (p.3). John Collier (18501934) was a painter of portraits and subject pictures. He studied at the Slade and was encouraged by Frys btes noires Edward Poynter and Alma-Tadema. Colliers definition of art is similar to that given by G.P. Lomazzo in his Trattato dellarte della pittura (Milan, 1585) where he wrote that pittura Arte laquale con linee proportionate, e con colori simili la natura de le cose, seguitando il lume perspettivo imita talmente la natura de le cose corporee ... (P.19).

It is probable then, that if a man should arrive in our city, so clever as to be able to assume any character and imitate any object, and should propose to make a public display of his talents and his productions, we shall pay him reverence as a sacred, admirable, and charming personage, but we shall tell him that in our state there is no one like him ... and we shall send him away to another city ... (The Republic ofplato, trans. J.L. Davies and D.J. Vaughan (Cambridge, 1866), iii, 923).

Tolstoy does not say precisely this but he condemns Beethovens Ninth Symphony for being unable to unite all men in one common feeling. (Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, trans. Aylmer Maude, 3rd ed. (1898), P.173).

Bastien-Lepage (185084), leader of the plein airiste school in France and a strong influence on the New English Art Club in its early years in England.

In Tolstoys story this is a wolf.

Denman Waldo Ross, Theory of Pure Design, Harmony, Balance, Rhythm (Boston and Cambridge, Mass., 1907).

Michelangelos Jeremiah is in the Sistine Chapel.

i.e. the Tondo Doni.

Le model humain a, chez eux, toute la beaute des lignes courbes de la fleur. Et les profiles sont fermes, amples comme ceux des grandes montagnes: cest de larchitecture (Gustave Coquiot, Le Vrai Rodin, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1913), p.226)

Antimacassar: a covering for the back of chairs to prevent staining from greasy hair. It was invented in the nineteenth century and Fry is using it as a symbol for Victorian attitudes.

Mr Podsnaps rhetoric: from Dickenss Our Mutual Friend (18645). Podsnap epitomises Victorian conservatism, narrowness and complacency.

the young person: i.e. Podsnaps daughter, Georgina. One of his tests of propriety was Would it bring a blush of shame to the cheeks of a young person?

Ojibbeways and Waramunga: tribes of North American Indians.

The Ottoman: a couch with a head but no back, the body of which is stuffed over so that no wood is visible.

a traitor: because the Ottoman (i.e. Turk) is a foreigner.

the Whatnot: a series of pillars holding shelves for china ornaments, and in this case the works of Tennyson and Whittier.

Tennyson and John Greenleaf Whittier: poets who represented, for Fry, Victorian propriety and moral rectitude. Whittier (180792) was an American Quaker.

Distance ... the view: Thomas Campbell, Pleasures of Hope (1799), pt. i, 1.7.

A Limoges casket: produced between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries in south western France.

A cassone is a marriage coffer. It is often highly decorated and has large feet in the shape of claws. The panels on it are frequently painted with mythological subjects or with fables.

Boccaccian freedom: a reference to the bawdy tales which make up the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio (131375).

Caffieri: after Jacques Caffieri (16781755), a French worker in metal.

Riesener: after Jean Henri Riesener (17341806), a French cabinet-maker of the Louis XVI period.

a Louis XV tabatire: a French rococo snuff box.

Stimmung: mood.

Leechs drawings: John Leech (181764) was a cartoonist for Punch from 1847.

crewel-work: embroidery in which a design is worked in worsted on a background of linen or cloth.

le style coco: not a term in general use, but probably a diminutive or variant of le style rococo.

a future article: i.e. The Artists Vision which follows in Vision and Design.

First published as The Artist in the Great State in Socialism and the Great State, ed. H.G. Wells et al. (1912), pp.25172. The passage This question ... upon all this? (pp.4951) was added by Fry when the article was revised for Vision and Design.