Richard Combes

LOWER MANHATTAN AFTER THE RAIN - Cityscape, Realism, New York City

2025

Richard Combes creates remarkably lifelike oil paintings that explore the relationship between vacant spaces and the solitary people who fleetingly occupy them.

Decaying inner-city building interiors, rain-soaked streets and solemn storefronts are the subjects of choice for the British artist’s award-winning realist work. Combes’s carefully rendered depictions are a love letter to disused spaces that time and the elements have left bedraggled and dilapidated. He has cited Impressionist and Surrealist art as having been influential for him, and his background as an architect provides him with a keen insight into the themes he explores in his work.

Combes was born in Manchester. He graduated from the architecture program at the University of Liverpool and immediately secured work in his field of study. Combes eventually felt dissatisfied with his career choice, as he began to notice that he was more interested in sketching the neglected and largely vacant spaces than finishing his architectural renderings that would form their replacement. Combes made a change — he moved to New York City and earned his MFA at the New York Academy of Art.

Combes was elected as a full member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 2004. His work has earned international acclaim and a lengthy list of prizes and awards. Combes’s paintings have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, and his work is in the private collections of many celebrities and prominent figures.

On 1stDibs, find original Richard Combes landscape paintings, still-life paintings and other art.