The Artist's Garden at Durbins, Guildford

Roger Fry, 1866–1934

ca. 1915

Oil on canvas

Yale Center for British Art

A person in a long dress tends to a garden filled with pink flowers and lush green trees under a hazy sky. In 1910, the influential art critic Roger Fry organized the first British exhibition of postimpressionist art at the Grafton Galleries in London. The same year, Fry designed and built his new house, Durbins, in which he aimed for the same abstraction to essentials in architecture that he saw as characteristic of the new way of painting. The main rooms of the house looked south across the garden to the Surrey countryside beyond. Fellow Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant mentioned sketching landscapes from these rooms. The garden was organized into orderly spaces divided by flower borders and hedges, softening the transi