Roger Fry was born in Highgate, London in 1866. He was educated at St George's School, Ascot and Clifton College, and studied Natural Sciences at King's College between 1885 and 1889. He was elected to the Cambridge Apostles in 1887. In 1889 he attended Francis Bate's art school in Hammersmith.

Roger Fry became an expert on old Italian masters and French Post-Impressionist painters. He was Curator of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art between 1906 and 1910. On his return to England he put on two controversial exhibitions of modern French art. Fry opened the Omega workshops in 1913 to encourage young artists into interior decoration, and helped John Maynard Keynes to form the London Artists' Association in the 1920s.

Fry wrote several books about art and gave popular public lectures. In 1933 he became the Slade Professor at Cambridge University. His own paintings included portraits of friends in the Bloomsbury Group.

Roger Fry married Helen Coombe on 3 December 1896; they had two children, Pamela and Julian. Helen became mentally unstable and spent most of her life in a home. From 1920 Fry spent a large part of each year in Provence.