Still life with blue bottle

Roger Fry, 1866–1934

1917

Oil on canvas

Yale Center for British Art

A still life painting depicts a blue bottle, a white cylindrical object, and a glass of water arranged on a table against an orange background. A patterned curtain is visible on the left. Roger Fry was a prominent art critic and member of the group of liberal minded writers, thinkers, and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. Like many in this elite circle, he was an advocate of French art and promoted the radical transformation of pictorial representation undertaken by artists including Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso. In 1910 and 1912, he organized two influential exhibitions that introduced modern French art to a British public and inspired a generation of young artists to embrace modernism. This work draws on impressionist and postimpressionist innovations in color perception in t