Richard Croft PPRUA (1935–2025)
Richard Croft was a distinguished painter and printmaker and an important figure in the development of contemporary art in Northern Ireland.
Born in London in 1935, Croft studied at Bromley College of Art and Brighton College of Art before moving to Belfast in the late 1950s. He initially combined his own artistic practice with a career in art education, later leaving teaching to work full-time from his studio in Dundrum, County Down.
Croft worked principally in painting, drawing and printmaking, with landscape and still life providing recurring themes throughout a career spanning more than six decades. His work is characterised by a strong sense of structure, colour and composition, frequently occupying the territory between figuration and abstraction. Beginning with direct observation, he would simplify and reorganise forms, exploring the underlying shapes, relationships and rhythms within a subject.
Drawing remained central to his practice throughout his life. Croft maintained sketchbooks almost continuously for many decades, using them both to record what he observed and to develop ideas that would later emerge in paintings and prints.
A founder member of Group 63 and the Octagon Gallery in Belfast, Croft was elected a member of the Royal Ulster Academy of Arts in 1967 and served as its President from 1997 to 2000. He exhibited extensively throughout Ireland and the UK, including numerous solo exhibitions and a touring retrospective which opened at the Naughton Gallery, Queen’s University Belfast, in 2003.
His work is represented in numerous public and institutional collections, including the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Ulster Museum, Queen’s University Belfast, Government of Northern Ireland Collection, University of Oxford and the National Self-Portrait Collection at the University of Limerick.
Richard Croft died in 2025, leaving a substantial and highly regarded body of work encompassing painting, drawing and printmaking.
