John Ryan (artist)

Friend and intimate (and sometime benefactor) to a number of struggling artists and writers in the post-war era, such as Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan; Ryan's memoirs, Remembering How We Stood, evoke literary Dublin of the period 1945-55.

He was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) from 1946 onwards, and also showed at the annual Oireachtas and the Irish Exhibition of Living Art (IELA).

During the war years he very cheaply rented a space above the family's Monument Creameries store (now a Burger King) on Grafton Street to sculptor Desmond MacNamara, and which became the site for a famous bohemian salon attended by all of the foregoing names and many more.

17, April 1951), inviting Brian O'Nolan to be guest editor; edited A Bash in the Tunnel: James Joyce by the Irish, Patrick Kavanagh, Brian O'Nolan, Samuel Beckett, Ulick O'Connor, Edna O'Brien (Brighton: Clifton Books 1970); saved Leopold Bloom's front door to 7 Eccles Street from demolition and used it in The Bailey pub in St. Anne Street, Dublin, from whence it was removed and transported to the Joyce Museum on N. Gt.

They were, in fact, Myles na gCopaleen, Sean O'Sullivan and Brendan Behan.From the foreword by J. P. Donleavy: As one reads his words, dressed in their wonderful finery of irony, the world he speaks of reblossoms to be back again awhile.

To see, feel and smell the Dublin of that day... a masterpiece of reminiscence.Bloomsday (a term Joyce himself did not employ) was invented in 1954, the 50th anniversary, when John Ryan and the novelist Flann O'Brien organised what was to be a daylong pilgrimage along the Ulysses route.

Ryan had engaged two horse drawn cabs, of the old-fashioned kind, which in Ulysses Mr. Bloom and his friends drive to poor Paddy Dignam's funeral.

The pilgrimage was abandoned halfway through, when the weary pilgrims succumbed to inebriation and rancour at the Bailey pub in the city centre, which Ryan then owned, and at which, in 1967, he installed the door to No.

Only a relatively few people will be aware of the lesser known original Kavanagh seat situated on the South Bank at the Lock Gates close to Baggot Street Bridge.

To this effect shortly after his death in 1967, a committee was formed by the late John Ryan and Denis Dwyer to collect a sum of money to purchase the materials and labour for the seat.