A collage artist and painter, Anne Ryan did not begin an art career until she was fifty and she was sixty before she began her small scale collages of found objects which are now her signature works. The style was cubist-inspired abstractions, highly colorful and textured. She only lived to age seventy but in the decade in which she did the collages, she was quite prolific from her Greenwich Village studio.

She was born in Hoboken, New Jersey to a wealthy Irish family. She attended a Catholic convent school and then St. Elizabeth's College, but left in 1911 before graduation to marry William Mc Fadden, a law student.

She was unhappy as a wife and mother and separated from her husband in 1923 and took back her maiden name. She ...