This head-and-shoulders portrait depicts the novelist Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), who wrote one of his most successful novels, Brave New World, around the same time as sitting for this portrait in late 1931. Huxley is widely acknowledged as one of the more original British novelists of the interwar years, and he took an occasional interest in the interest in the visual arts, as his first novel Crome Yellow (1921) illustrates, with its tale of the ill-fated avant-gardiste painter Gombauld (a thinly veiled roman à clef of Mark Gertler). Huxley became familiar with the ‘Bloomsbury’ circle of friends through the society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, whose country house parties at Garsington Manor he attended, having previously worked as a farm labourer there during the war. In the early thirties Huxley came into the milieu of Fry and another painter, Vanessa Bell, owing to his especially close friendship at the time with Clive Bell.

Fry and Huxley had known one another since the First World War. When Fry resigned the editorship of The Burlington Magazine in 1919, he invited Huxley to his house in Guildford for the weekend with the purpose of offering it to him. Huxley described the occasion in a letter to his brother:

"I went last week end to stay with old Roger Fry, who for a man of over fifty is far the youngest person I have ever seen. I am not sure that he isn't really younger than one is oneself. So susceptible to new ideas, so much interested in things, so disliking the old—it is wonderful. [...] He is an enchanting old thing. [...] Fry asked me if I would undertake the editorship of the Burlington Magazine, but as (a) I know nil about art and (b) the wages are very small, I am inclined to think I shall not."

In her biography of Roger Fry, Frances Spalding remarked that this portrait of Huxley was ‘lost’. It came to light in 2017 when it was acquired from a private collection by Philip Mould & Company. Spalding wrote that during sittings ‘the author distracted the painter with his incessant, brilliant talk’. It is possible that Fry painted Huxley’s portrait side-by-side with Vanessa Bell, who also made a portrait painting of Huxley, which is now owned by the National Portrait Gallery. The only salient difference between Fry and Bell’s paintings is the colour of the sitter’s tie: in Fry’s it is earth green; in Bell’s it is peach orange.

A terminus post quem for Fry’s portrait of Huxley is provided by a letter of Clive Bell’s, dated 18 January 1932: ‘[Fry] has now completed a very large portrait of Aldous which in horror surpasses anything he has ever painted before, and I think anything I have ever seen.’ Although not ‘very large’, this head-and-shoulders painting is likely the same work as that which Bell described; conservation in 2017 yielded evidence that this work was cut down from a larger canvas and restretched.