Yet he sincerely believed in the value of the paintings he had selected. With their vibrant colours, vigorous brushstrokes and apparent freedom from the teaching of hidebound academies, the Post-Impressionists seemed to him to be compatible with his earlier interest in Renaissance art. The Impressionists had, he maintained, been weak on ‘structural design’. In Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, it had begun to reassert itself. The history of art was, to Fry’s way of thinking, an unbroken continuum. Picasso might seem alien to the uninitiated but, in reality, he was only pushing things ‘a little
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