Five leading lights of the Bloomsbury Group
THE CELEBRATED ECONOMIST
John Maynard Keynes
In his final year at King’s College, Cambridge, Keynes (1883–1946) could not decide whether his main intellectual preoccupation should be economics or moral philosophy. He opted for the former in 1908, took up a lectureship and in 1915 joined the Treasury. His book The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) placed him at the centre of a controversy about the economic reconstruction of Europe.
In addition to an incredibly busy working life, Keynes found time to make and lose several speculative fortunes, marry the ballerina Lydia Lopokova, form a picture and book collection, set up the Arts Theatre in Cambridge and spearhead the creation of the Arts Council of Great Britain.
THE ANARCHIC MIND
Lytton Strachey
Having begun life as an intensely nervous, lanky, invalidish schoolboy, Strachey (1880–1932) encountered a liberal attitude at Cambridge that licensed his delight in bawdy humour and salacious wit. He increasingly displayed a subtly anarchic mind that exposed the preposterous, the sad or absurd in human beings. He followed his book Eminent Victorians with a life of Queen Victoria and then Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History.
Strachey attracted the devotion of Dora Carrington, and, though homosexual, agreed to set up home with her. She compared their routine existence to that of the hens, outwardly “every day the same, apparently”, but inside “what a variety and what fantastic doings. And great schemes I suspect.”
THE RENEGADE IMPRESARIO
Roger Fry
Fry (1866–1934) studied natural sciences at Cambridge and then painting under Francis Bate. Initially he distrusted modern art, especially that exhibited by his peers in the New English Art, which seemed weakly imitative of French Impressionism. His attention turned instead to the Old Masters.
He gained a job as European adviser to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Shocked to discover the Met’s chairman, J Pierpoint Morgan, had been putting his own interests as a collector before those of the museum, Fry made his own opinions on this known and immediately lost his job.
He went on to become the impresario of the new movement in art that sprang into being after he became involved with modern art, through his two post-impressionist exhibitions.
