Last Lectures

by Roger Eliot Fry

Originally published in 1939, this book contains a series of unfinished lectures written by Roger Fry, the Slade Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Cambridge. Fry's lectures cover a wide range of artistic styles, from the art of Ancient Greece and Egypt to American and Chinese art, as well as a review of art history as an academic study. The text is accompanied by over three hundred photographic plates of many important artworks. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in art history.

Genres: Art

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

Roger Eliot Fry was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism. He was the first figure to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain, and emphasized the formal properties of paintings over the "associated ideas" conjured in the viewer by their depicted content. He was described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as "incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin... In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry".