This story was published in 1999 and the exhibition is now closed The enormous influence of the designer, painter, critic and historian Roger Fry is at the heart of the new winter exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in London’s Somerset House.

‘Art Made Modern: Roger Fry’s Vision of Art’, opened on October 15 and runs until January 24. It looks at the career of the man who shocked British society when he introduced French Post-Impressionist painting to London in two exhibitions, and was the intimate of the Bloomsbury Group of painters, writers, designers and thinkers.

Fry, who died in 1934 at the age of 68, was passionate about modern art and encouraged British artists to follow French examples of experiment. Works from the Courtauld as well as important loans will bring together paintings by Picasso, Mattisse, Van Gogh, Cezanne and Seurat, and show them next to a selection of the work of British painters of the early 20th Century.

There are also the Old Master pictures which influenced him, buy the likes of Uccello, El Greco, Rembrandt, Chardin and Rubens.

But Fry was also a practitioner, and the exhibition includes furniture, textiles and ceramics produced by his Omega Workshops.