Adrian Ryan 1920-1998

In his lifetime, Ryan was referred to by his many artist friends and contemporaries - Francis Bacon, Patrick Heron, Dod Procter, Augustus John, John Minton, Betty Swanwick, Sven Berlin among them, as a ‘painter’s painter’ and as a ‘well-kept secret of the art world’. Indeed, many of these artists did not hesitate to acquire his works for themselves.

This relative anonymity is easy to understand for Ryan was a modest man, an old-fashioned, gentlemanly intellectual who would rather retire to the local pub for a chat than indulge in the pursuit of sales and self-promotion which he found somewhat vulgar. He was no doubt helped to a degree by financial security – his Irish grandfather Sir Gerald Ryan had amassed a fortune in insurance, allowing him to be educated at Eton and thereafter to set up studio in fashionable Chelsea after a period of study at the Slade School of Art,

In 1943 he held his first solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery - a great success and this was followed by four more at the same venue over the next ten years. In 1945 he set up a studio at Mousehole in Cornwall which was to prove highly significant in his development. He became associated with the St Ives painters and was, for a while, elected president of the Newlyn Painters before being asked to stand down after he suggested their meetings be held in the local pub!

Ryan chose not to follow the path to abstraction taken by many of his Cornish contemporaries, in fact, remaining somewhat bemused by the trend – of his friend Graham Sutherland he observed, “those thorn motifs amounted to nothing in my book”. It was in fact Sutherland who in 1948 offered him a post as Lecturer at Goldsmiths College, London, a post he held until 1983, combining it with a similar role at Cambridge College of Art from 1973-85. His affinity for the work of the French Post-Impressionists is clear – Soutine and Utrillo were early influences but as the art critic Eardley Knollys observed, “he has never been their imitator”. The same writer went on: “By returning to the palette of the Post-Impressionists and the Fauves, Adrian Ryan seems to illuminate the wastelands of English painting”. Perhaps the most insightful words on his method are his own, “Man is not a camera. The object of painting is not to copy but to express one's delight in the colours, shapes, forms and relationships of the objects of one's contemplation”.

Further solo and mixed exhibitions have been held at the National Trust, Eton College, Charleston, Marlborough Gallery, The Tate Gallery, Gallery Timothy Tew, Atlanta, etc and at the Redfern again. Ryan was a regular exhibitor at the R.A. His work is in the collections of the Tate Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, The National Galleries of Northern Ireland and New Zealand though much of his work remains in private hands.