Lytton Strachey

(Giles) Lytton Strachey

Sitter in 144 portraits
Artist associated with 5 portraits
The son of a soldier administrator in the Colonial Service, Strachey went to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1899. While at Cambridge, Strachey joined the ranks of the 'Apostles', a select group including Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster. These individuals later formed the nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group, and Strachey remained a central figure throughout the heyday of Old Bloomsbury, prior to the outbreak of the First World War. His iconoclastic biographical essays Eminent Victorians (1918), set a new standard for biography for the twentieth century, and Elizabeth and Essex (1928), about Queen Elizabeth I, was influential in the way it mixed biography with fiction.