Allinson was a member of the great Slade generation that included Gertler, Nevinson, Stanley Spencer and Edward Wadsworth. A prolific exhibitor with the London Group between the wars, his work received critical acclaim for its technical excellence and distinct individuality. His use of strong colour and his landscape design owed something to the work of Derain. In an introduction to his retrospective exhibition at the Fine Art Society, Terence Mullaly observed: 'At his best Adrian Allinson was both a landscape painter and a figure and still-life painter who knew exactly what he was doing. His portraits are simple and extraordinarily direct, indeed one of the tantalising things concerning them is that although today the identity of the sitters has in many cases been lost, we feel we know them.' A great traveller, he worked in Munich, Paris, North Africa, Greece, Spain, Venice and Ibiza. He was also a talented sculptor, showing many examples at the London Group and serving on the committee of the 1930 London Group Open-Air Sculpture Exhibition held on the roof gardens of Selfridges & Co. He also exhibited with the NEAC and in later years he showed at the RA. He became a distinguished stage designer to the Beecham Opera Company and for a time was a teacher at the Westminster School of Art. In 1984 the Fine Art Society organised a retrospective exhibition of his work.