painter and illustrator, born Ipswich UK; studied horse painting in England and worked at Julian’s, Paris. Came to Sydney in 1899 and from 1905 was a member of the Royal Art Society of New South Wales. In 1907 Fry was a founding exhibitor with the newly re-instated New South Wales Society of Artists, where he exhibited sporting pictures (in the 1907 exhibition he collaborated with Sydney Long on “The Valley” [catalogue number 234], a large canvas: Long painted the landscape and Fry painted the horse and horseman). A keen horseman himself (he taught Norman Lindsay to ride), his drawings of horses were admired by Julian Ashton . He was called 'the best painter of the horse we have yet seen in Australia’, when he exhibited at the 1909 annual exhibition of the Society of Artists, Sydney. '[He] has never done a better piece of work than in his head of “Mountain King”. His drawing is always careful and recondite, but in this “portrait” he has surpassed himself in the treatment of surfaces. His big composition, “How the Chestnut Horse Came Home,” [ill. p.668] is a fine representation of a blood horse standing at the slip-rails in an attitude that expresses a condition of high nervous excitement’: 'The Art of the Year’, Lone Hand , 1 April 1910, pp. 663-664 [by the magazine’s 'art correspondents’]. Fry also illustrated a horsey story in the 1909-10 volume of the Lone Hand , a very painterly work. Also contributed to the Sydney Mail and other magazines and was a popular painter of race horses.

According to Conor Macleod, in Macleod of the Bulletin (Sydney, 1931, p.34), Fry was 'a tall, lean, monosyllabic Englishman who had an intensely conservative mind and a pronounced Oxford accent, and looked as if he had been poured into his riding pants and boots (which he always wore). He was a great friend of Norman Lindsay.’

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007