Bryan Ingham
Bryan Ingham (1936–1997) was a British painter, printmaker, collagist and sculptor whose work was shaped by the landscape of Cornwall, a deep knowledge of European modernism and an exceptional command of etching. Working deliberately away from the mainstream London art world, he developed a highly personal body of work characterised by restraint, close observation and an intense sensitivity to materials.
Born in Preston, Lancashire, and raised in Yorkshire, Ingham began painting while completing his National Service with the RAF in Germany. He studied at St Martin’s School of Art from 1957 to 1961 and subsequently at the Royal College of Art, where he worked under Carel Weight and became particularly absorbed by etching.
An Italian Government Scholarship and Leverhulme Postgraduate Research Award enabled him to travel extensively in Italy and spend part of 1966 at the British School in Rome. The experience reinforced his admiration for Renaissance art while also bringing him into closer contact with the European traditions of Cubism and abstraction that would inform his later work.
On returning to Britain, Ingham chose to settle in Cornwall rather than pursue a conventional career in London. For more than twenty-five years he lived and worked at Jollytown, an isolated cottage on the Lizard Peninsula overlooking Kynance Cove. Without electricity or running water, it became both home and studio and provided the setting for much of his work. The surrounding fields, farm buildings, rocks, coastline and sea recur throughout his etchings and paintings.
Etching was central to Ingham’s work during the 1960s and 1970s. He drew directly from his surroundings and translated churches, farm machinery, gardens and the Cornish coastline into deeply bitten, heavily worked plates. He regarded the laborious process of etching as a way of accumulating experience rather than merely reproducing an image, and many of his prints survive in relatively small editions.
Although closely associated with Cornwall, Ingham resisted easy identification with the St Ives School. He admired artists such as Ben Nicholson and Peter Lanyon, while his work also reflects an engagement with Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris and Mondrian. These influences were absorbed into an increasingly personal visual language rather than adopted as a style.
From the 1980s Ingham developed an important connection with Worpswede, the historic artists’ colony in northern Germany. He returned there repeatedly, exhibited successfully in Germany and increasingly explored collage. Fragments of paper, card and printed material were assembled into spare still lifes, interiors and abstracted heads, while his paintings themselves often acquired the layered, constructed quality of collage.
Still life became particularly important in his later work. Jugs, bottles, flowers, tables and domestic objects were reduced to carefully balanced arrangements of shape, texture and muted colour. His Mediterranean Heads, produced principally during the late 1980s and 1990s, similarly combine the lessons of Cubism with the physical presence of collage and relief.
Ingham exhibited in Britain and Germany throughout his career, with later exhibitions bringing increasing recognition to his paintings, prints and constructions. Major posthumous presentations have included exhibitions of his prints in Cornwall and a substantial London exhibition in 2006. His work has continued to be reassessed through exhibitions devoted to his Cornish etchings and later paintings.
The Redfern Gallery has continued to present Ingham’s work within exhibitions of Modern British art, including its Spring Exhibitions, reflecting renewed interest in an artist whose deliberately independent career followed a path very different from many of his contemporaries.
His work is held in public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, the Arts Council Collection and the Government Art Collection.
