The family moved to Melbourne in 1937 when she was eleven years old and where she was educated at St Catherine's in Toorak,[2][3] where printmaker Barbara Brash, was a contemporary, both following Sunday Reed's earlier attendance.
[5] In August 1952 Patrick's father Rupert Sumner Ryan,[6] grazier and Federal Liberal MP for Flinders since 1940,[7] died leaving his property Edrington near Berwick and personal estate valued at £163,520 (worth over A$6m in 2021).
[8] Though largely estranged from his parents, Patrick as the only son inherited the majority of the legacy, selling his share of Edrington to his aunt Maie, wife of then Minister for External Affairs (later Governor-General) Richard G.
[10][11] After their return to Melbourne the Ryan's son Domenic and daughter Siobhan were born before 1960,[2] when Rosemary began regularly exhibiting her paintings in a series of solo shows held every two or three years until 1993.
[15] Early in her career Ryan experimented with using a spray gun in an approach to Pop Art,[16] but consolidated her imagery in fin-de-siècle and Edwardian Australian idylls with a gentle feminist edge.
[25][26] As remembered by Susan McCulloch, to prepare for her 1983 solo exhibition at Zanders Bond Gallery Ryan held a barbecue for 30 friends on the banks of the Yarra in November 1982, where they posed for her Australian version of Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, and Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe.
The naïve style of these recent works captures the Australian bush with the sort of youthful charm that this natural monument so often inspires.”[29] Some early praise came when Ryan showed at the Victorian Artists' Society spring exhibition while still studying with George Bell in 1952, when The Bulletin picked out her Two-dimensional Still Life as "possibly the best of the abstractions.
[31]Art historian and critic Bernard Smith in The Age reacted positively to her next show there 9 months later; Rosemary Ryan's exhibition (South Yarra) is the surprise of the week.
Victorian keepsakes, family albums, cameos and old photographs of young soldiers who went away to the wars are suggested in scumbled paint, rose-violet and acid-green, to evoke in Proustian fashion the quality of events half-remembered, half-forgotten.
[35] Ann Galbally however, in reviewing Ryan’s 1971 show at Australian Galleries, notes her deliberate imitation of old photographs and Victorian albums to evoke nostalgic sentiment; “What with smiling aviators, picnics in the bush, family parties and songs in the rain, life couldn't be sweeter, or sicklier,”[36] and Maureen Gilchrist is ambivalent about her “cute tricks with old master themes,” in her solo show at Powell Street Gallery in 1976, asking, “Where does the artist stand in relation to her content?
[38] In 2006, McCulloch's New Encyclopaedia of Australian Art describes her paintings as having; "poetically evoked memories of country life in Australia in pre-WWII times and occasionally allegorical scenes.