Dick Romyn was an artist deeply committed to representation, and he was particularly drawn to the still life, and to musical subjects or evocations.

He studied in Geneva and London, but his career was interrupted by the war, when he was held in a Japanese POW camp. In the 1950s, he settled in Paris, where Georges Braque was his mentor. His first one-man shows look place there, and he remained more active in continental Europe than in Britain, although he showed with the Boundary Gallery in London in the 1990s.

Invariably known as Dick Romyn, not only to his wide circle of friends but also professionally and in even the sternest reference books, Romyn had in fact been born Conrad Romyn. The modification is somehow symbolic of the man: it would be difficult to imagine a painter so modest and unassuming, so easy and unpretentious in his presentation of himself.

Though born in London, he seemed in his art to have little to do with any recognisably English tradition. That is explicable if one runs down the list prepared by himself in the Eighties of the places and circumstances in which he had studied art. Not to mention his wartime experiences, which he seldom spoke of and never published.

At the age of 18 he was in the Ecole des Beaux Arts of Geneva University, and immediately after demobilisation he spent two years in London at the Anglo-French School and the Polytechnic. But otherwise all his learning was done, according to his own account, in the great museums and art galleries of Europe: in Amsterdam in 1936, Rome in 1950, and, in 1948, in Paris under the personal guidance of Braque.

The war was, as for so many of his generation, the great interruption to his budding career as an artist. He was called up and posted to Burma, where he was captured by the Japanese and spent several years in a Japanese POW camp in much the same circumstances as fellow artists Ronald Searle and Philip Meninsky. Though undoubtedly this experience marked him deeply, he managed very well the awkward transition back to the west, civilian life and a reasonably conventional form of the artist's life.

And indeed, what better way of re-tooling an artist’s life than settling in Paris, where Romyn lived from 1953 to 1962? During these years he came to know his mentor Braque particularly well, but also found himself living in what seemed to be the hub of the artistic world at the tail end of the classic Existentialist years.

Occasionally his art tended slightly towards abstraction, but he was at base deeply committed to representation, and never strayed very far from observed reality.

He was particularly drawn to the still life, and to musical subjects or evocations. Many of his works, particularly later on, were tiny, and his friends were sure to receive a regular flow of even tinier wash and ink drawings, often of single figures or small groups, suggestive of the rococo theatre and leading to speculation as to whether Tiepolo or even Callot had been among his subjects of study in his museum years. His gifts as a light-hearted draughtsman led to a number of illustrative commissions, among them illustrated diaries on Morocco and St Lucia — this latter commissioned by the St Lucia government.

His public career began relatively late: his first two one-man exhibitions, one of paintings and one of drawings, took place in Paris in 1959, when he was already in his mid-forties, and though in the 1960s he had a regular dealer relationship with the Upper Grosvenor Gallery, and showed with the Boundary Gallery in the 1990s, in general London saw less of him than several Continental centres, especially in France and Sweden. His wife of 36 years, Ann, is Swedish (and herself an accomplished painter, known professionally as Ann Bergson), and their circle of friends was always astonishingly international, for a couple who lived very quietly near the gates of Hampton Court. This all shows in Romyn’s art, which seems finally to belong to no nation but his own personal realm.

He is survived by his wife and daughter.

Dick Romyn, painter and designer, was born on November 18, 1915. He died on April 10, 2007, aged 91