Hull – Ferens Art Gallery (Julian, the Artist’s Son by Roger Eliot Fry)

I felt that I had to comment on this photo given the subject’s name. Roger Eliot Fry lived from 1866 until 1934 and seemed multi-talented, being an artist, author, public speaker and lecturer.  The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists notes that Fry had a “more modest reputation as an artist”, which I suspect is a polite way of saying that he was really quite average at painting, but was brilliant at lecturing. Fry had two children, Pamela and Julian, with the latter being the subject of this 1911 artwork, when he was aged 10. Roger Fry was also the grandson of Joseph Fry, the one of chocolate fame…

I was intrigued to see what happened to Julian Edward Fry and I found that he’s listed on the passenger list of a ship which headed from Southampton to Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada in 1923. He made other journeys to Canada and the United States over the next few years, so his family had clearly retained some wealth. He married the Canadian Eva Kathleen Lockwood in 1930 and they had three children, who were Roger, Alan and Joan, with Julian dying in 1984 in British Colombia, Canada. Alan Fry was born in 1931 and died in 2018, with family members seemingly still living in Canada.