Submitted by Jane Durkin on Tue, 10/06/2025 - 17:35
University of Cambridge Library and Archives staff have brought to light a handwritten and illustrated thesis by the famous Bloomsbury artist Roger Fry in the Department of Plant Sciences archives.
Roger Fry graduated from King’s College Cambridge with a degree in Natural Sciences in 1888 before travelling to Italy and France to study art and eventually going on to teach art history at the Slade School of Fine Art.
He joined the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of artists, writers and intellectuals originating in the Bloomsbury home of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, in 1910.
He used the dissertation on 'The hair structures of the bladders of Utricularia vulgaris' to apply - unsuccessfully - for a Fellowship at King’s College in the 1890s.
The manuscript has detailed descriptions and illustrations of the bladderworts, in a study designed to respond to Charles Darwin’s ‘Insectivorous Plants’ (1875), which Fry states was “not altogether correct”.
Liz Smith, Digital Curator for 19th Century Science Collections at the University Library, came across the dissertation whilst surveying the archival documents held in the Plant Sciences Library.
“We know from the accompanying letters and provenance information that the thesis was donated to what was then the Botany School in 1942 by F.E. Lloyd, Professor at McGill University. He had discovered the manuscript in a second-hand bookshop in Cambridge in the 1930s,” said Department of Plant Sciences Librarian, Frances Marsh.
“With the increased attention to natural history humanities, it’s exciting to see the wide range of Cambridge alumni who engaged with botany. It was amazing to realise that the R. Fry who created such a beautifully illustrated dissertation on Utricularia was the same person as the Bloomsbury Group artist,” said Liz Smith.
The document is now rehoused at the King’s College Archives, who are the primary repository of Roger Fry’s archives.
“At King’s, this exciting document will be made more accessible to historians of art, history of science researchers and Bloomsbury scholars. Most of their manuscripts relate to his life as an artist so these papers offer a new perspective on Fry’s earlier scientific training,” Frances Marsh said.
The thesis is catalogued and can be viewed along with other archive material by appointment at the reading room at the King’s College Archive Centre.
View King’s College Archive online exhibition: Roger Eliot Fry (1866-1934)
Image: Illustrations of bladderworts from Roger Fry’s thesis on 'The hair structures of the bladders of Utricularia vulgaris'. Photo credit: University of Cambridge.