Roger Fry studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge before turning to art in the late 1880s. He was Curator of Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for a brief period before returning to London and a career as writer, critic and painter. His defence of Cézanne and Gauguin in 1908 in 'The Burlington Magazine', followed by the Post-Impressionist exhibitions which he organized in London in 1910 and 1912, established his reputation as a proselytizer for modern (French) art, although his intellectual and aesthetic enthusiasms were broad, and his open- mindedness led him to constant reviews of his own critical position. Chauvigny is a market town east of Poitiers in central France, and was among the places visited by Roger Fry in October 1911 when, after his visit to Paris to see the Salon d’Automne, he joined Clive Bell and Duncan Grant on a bicycle tour of the region to explore Romanesque churches.