Ceri Giraldus RichardsCBE (6 June 1903 – 9 November 1971) was a Welsh painter, print-maker and maker of reliefs.[2]
Biography
Richards was born in 1903 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 mother came from a family of craftsmen; his father, an employee of a tinplate foundry in Gowerton, was active in the local chapel and wrote poetry in Welsh and English. For many years he conducted the Dunvant Excelsior Male Voice Choir, which would become the Dunvant Male 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 the Gower Peninsula and the cycles of nature.
In 1921, at the age of 18, Richards enrolled full-time at the Swansea School of Art, then under the direction of William Grant Murray. During his time at the art school 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.
Afterwards Richards spent most of his life in London, apart from a period teaching art in Cardiff, where he was head of painting at Cardiff School of Art during World War II.[2]
In 1929 he married Frances Clayton, a fellow artist.[3] They had two daughters – Rachel (born 1932) and Rhiannon (born 1945). Rachel married the paleontologist Colin Patterson.[4]
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.
Richards died in London on 9 November 1971. He was buried, with his parents, in the churchyard of Ebenezer Chapel in Dunvant, not far from where he was born.[citation needed]
Mel Gooding, Ceri Richards (2002), ISBN0-906506-20-4 - described at "Ceri Richards". Welsh Arts Archive. Archived from the original on 10 February 2007. [by Richards's son-in-law]
