Famously Kenneth Clark had described Fry and Ricketts as critics belonging to two opposite schools, but for a few years shortly after 1900 Fry and Ricketts had much in common and were active in the same milieu.[5] They exhibited their work in the same gallery, Carfax and Co., wrote for the same journal, The Burlington magazine, and their writings on art had much in common too. Fry and Ricketts both favoured the period between 1400 and 1700, Italian art in particular, and both had an understanding of the importance of the art of the past for the present, as Ricketts poetically described: ‘nothing beautiful and welcome in human endeavour is without ascendancy in the best of our experience, which we call the art of the past’.[6]