Love's Messengers

Henry Ryland had a successful and varied career as a painter, designer and watercolorist. He initially trained at the South Kensington School of Art before going to Paris and studying at the Académie Julian. He was influenced both by Neo-Classicism and the Pre-Raphaelites, and his work was characterized by a high degree of finish and comprised primarily of single figures within simple classical settings. He exhibited frequently at the Royal Academy between 1890 and 1903, and the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour. It was during this time that he established a reputation as one of the foremost neo-classical painters of the period working in watercolour, with his rendering of marble reminiscent of his contemporaries Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912) and John William Godward (1861-1922).