A specialist in Italian Renaissance art, Fry wrote articles for the Burlington Magazine which he helped found, and until 1910 acted as European adviser to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. From 1910 he was closely linked with Bloomsbury. Following the two Post-Impressionism exhibitions he organized in 1910 and 1912–13 he was a leading figure among the avant-garde. In 1913, he founded the Omega workshops, which applied new principles of mass, line, form and color to the production of furniture, fabrics and jewellery. Active as a painter, he also continued to write, producing eight books in the last 10 years of his life, notably Transformations (1927) and Cézanne (1928). This self portrait was one of a number in which Fry presents himself gazing out through spectacles at the viewer. Painted in the last 4 years of Fry's life, it uses a subdued palette and a restrained naturalism. Having earlier been a leading champion of Matisse and Picasso, this puzzled some observers. Significantly, however, Kenneth Clark identified a 'naïve earnestness' in such works.