Ceri Richards | Feathers and Furnaces, Jonathan Clark Fine Art

Ceri Richards, Costerwoman, 1942, ink and watercolour, 30.5x23.5cms, courtesy of Jonathan Clark Fine Art

To use the parlance of the time, the Welsh artist Ceri Richards (1903-1971) ‘had a good war’, though it didn’t start off terribly well.

He was brought up in a working-class mining village, Dunvant, between Swansea and the Gower Peninsular, his devout Methodist father a tinplate foundryman, his mother a primary-school teacher. His parents were lovers of music, poetry and art: as a child Richards became a talented pianist, and a keen and highly accomplished draughtsman.

 He won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, taught by Henry Moore, who later dubbed him ‘the best draughtsman of his generation’, high praise indeed. For a spell in the 30s he worked as an illustrator, but was able to give this up when his paintings began selling successfully in commercial galleries. He also taught at Chelsea School of Art, alongside Moore and Graham Sutherland.

 And then, in September 1939, the war broke out. The art market collapsed, and the London art schools were shut down. Richards took his family (he’d had two daughters with fellow artist Frances Clayton) to Suffolk, where he found a job as a farm labourer in the sugar beet fields: back-breaking work.

 He was saved from this situation by an invitation to return to Wales, as Head of Painting at Cardiff School of Art. By night he was a Home Guard, a dangerous job as Cardiff was heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe. He was also commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee to depict home front workers, choosing his father’s tinplate foundry as his subject. The resultant paintings were exhibited at the National Museum of Wales in 1944, and then at the Glynn Vivian Gallery in Swansea.

Jonathan Clark Fine Art Gallery represent Richards’ estate, and studies made in situ in the foundry are displayed in their current exhibition, hence the ‘Furnaces’ in its title. The ‘Feathers’ refers to the garments worn by the costermonger Pearly Kings and Queens, who had inspired the artist when he was living in London: wartime sketches of these flamboyant figures, also on show.

Richards had a profound knowledge of art history and drew influences from far and wide, often employing surrealist, cubist and symbolist techniques. The depictions of the Pearly Kings and Queens bring to mind Pablo Picasso’s deconstruction and fragmentation; the tinplate workers, Henry Moore’s scribbly figurative draughtsmanship. But all the pieces show the assured, evocative and inimitable hand of Ceri Richards himself. As the critic Bryan Robertson wrote, in 1960: ‘Ceri’s drawings are full of life: he virtually could not put a mark on paper without invoking, involuntarily, a suggestive resonance which came from areas of imaginative possibilities far beyond their immediate descriptive task’.

Richards went on to have a stellar career. He was given a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1960, was a prize-winner at the Venice Biennale and won the Einaudi Painting Prize in 1962. In 1963 he was taken on by the Marlborough Gallery. His work spanned a wide range of mediums: he collaborated with Benjamin Britten to produce the set design for his opera The Rape of Lucretia, and was a pioneer fine-art printmaker, working with the Curwen Press from the late fifties, until his death in 1971. That his name is largely unfamiliar to the general public today, despite his significant success, immense talent and prolific output, is something of a mystery. His reputation is well due a reassessment: perhaps this exhibition will go a small way to redressing the balance.

 Read more about the exhibition in BLAST | Art Market Report by Colin Gleadell

Ceri Richards: Feathers and Furnaces., Jonathan Clark Fine Art, May 16 – June 9