Robin Ironside (1912 – 1965) started his career as No. 2 to Sir John Rothenstein at the Tate during the war but gave it all up to become an artist.

A brilliant and fascinating man, who was addicted to a morphine-based drug, Dr. Collis Brown’s Chlorodyne and who experimented with mescaline, he not only painted his meticulous and weird pictures far into the night, but also wrote extensively about art for Horizon magazine and Encounter. He was a friend of Francis Bacon (and even exhibited with him) and patronised by people like Lady Emerald Cunard and Sir Edward Hulton.

He coined the word “neo-romantic” and revived interest, almost single-handed, in the Pre-Raphaelites. A Baudelaire-like figure who existed almost entirely on hard-boiled eggs, he died at the age of 53.

An exhibition of his work has just finished at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester – and there will be another, even bigger one, at the Grosvenor Gallery in Chester in September.

“…for all the conflated hints of romanticism, symbolism and surrealism, his work is singular in its eccentricity. There is nothing quite like it.”
~ Laura Cumming in The Observer

“Though I revere Ironside as a critic, his work as a watercolourist comes as a revelation. He is a painter
of baroque palaces fallen into ruin and the corpses of beautiful youths decomposing in overgrown
gardens, of dying poets, escaped madmen
and clandestine burials. “
~ Richard Dorment in the Daily Telegraph.