Ceri Richards

Ceri Geraldus Richards (1903–1971) was a British painter and print-maker.

Biography

Richards was born in the village of Dunvant, near Swansea, the son of Thomas Coslett Richards and Sarah Richards (born Jones). He and his younger brother and sister, Owen and Esther, were brought up in a highly cultured, working-class environment. His father, an employee of a tinplate foundry in Gowerton, was active in the local church, wrote poetry in Welsh and English and for many years conducted the Dunvant Excelsior Male Voice Choir. All three children were taught to play the piano, and became familiar with the works of Bach and Handel in the cycle of Christian celebration. In later years music would be an important stimulus to Richards's painting - as would his youthful sensitivity to the landscapes of Gower and the cycles of nature.

Although Richards's mother came from a family of craftsmen, church and village provided the boy with little artistic stimulus, yet at Gowerton Intermediate School he drew constantly and won local competitions. When he left school to become apprenticed to a firm of electricians in Swansea, he devoted his evenings to studying engineering draughtsmanship at Swansea College of Technology and drawing at the Swansea College of Art (now Swansea Metropolitan University).

In 1921, at the age of 18, Richards enrolled full-time at the Swansea College of Art, then under the direction of William Grant Murray. Yet during his time at the College he spent less time in painting than in drawing from classical casts and studying industrial design and graphics. The strongest impact on him during these years appears to have been the week's summer school in 1923, which he spent under the direction of Hugh Blaker at Gregynog Hall, the country house of Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, where he first saw the canvases of Renoir, Van Gogh, Monet, Cézanne, Corot and Daumier, the sculpture of Rodin and sheets of old-master and modern drawings. The experience confirmed him in his vocation; and in the same year he applied for, and won, a scholarship to study in London at the Royal College of Art.

Richards entered the Royal College of Art in 1924.

Afterwards Richards spent most of his life in London, apart from a period teaching art in Cardiff.

In 1929 he married Frances Clayton, a fellow artist. His work gradually moved towards surrealism after exposure to the work of Picasso and Kandinsky. He was also a talented musician, and music is a theme for much of his artwork. From 1959 onwards, he made prints for the Curwen Press. One of the high points of his career was the Venice Biennale of 1962, where he was a prizewinner.

Many of his works are in the Tate collection, in London.[1] The Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea also holds a collection (where Richards' first solo exhibition took place in 1930). Good examples of his work are also to be found in the gallery of the National Museum Cardiff and the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester.

Select Works

• Still Life with Music (1933)

• The Sculptor and his Object (1934)

• The Sculptor in his Studio (1937)

• The Female Contains All Qualities (1937)

• Blossoms (1940)

• The Coster Woman (1943)

• The force that through the green fuse drives the flower (three lithographs) (1947)

• The Pianist (1948)

• Interior with piano, woman and child painting (1949)

• Trafalgar Square (1951)

• Black Apple of Gower (1952)

• Beethoven and St Cecilia (1953)

• Do not go gentle into that good night (1956) [2 versions]

• Deposition (1958)

• La Cathedrale engloutie (1957–1962) [series]

• Poissons d'or (1963)

• Claire de lune (1967)

• White Blossom (1968)

• Elegy for Vernon Watkins (1971)

Further reading

• M. Gooding, Ceri Richards (2002), ISBN 0906506204 - described at [2] [by Richards's son-in-law]
• Ceri Richards and Dylan Thomas - Keys To Transformation A Monograph by Richard Burns (1981)
• Ceri Richards Drawings to Poems by Dylan Thomas (1980)
• J. Rothenstein, Modern English Painters Wood to Hockney (1974)
• R. Sanesi, The Graphic Work of Ceri Richards (1973)
• J. Ormond, 'Ceri Richards root and branch', in Planet; 10 (1972 February / March)
• Homage to Ceri Richards 1903-1971 [Fischer Fine Art catalogue] (1972]
• Music in Drama (1958)

External links

• Brief biography

Persondata
Name	Richards, Ceri
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1903
Place of birth
Date of death	1971
Place of death