Irish artist and writer Ralph Cusack began to paint in the 1930s while living in the south of France. He returned to Ireland at the outbreak of the Second World War where he became a member of the Dublin Society of Painters and sat on the executive committee of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. He also exhibited with the White Stag Group and worked as a set designer with Anne Yeats. His paintings usually have a surrealist or symbolist element to them. Cusack settled in France in 1954.