Frances Richards

Background

Frances Clayton was born in 1903 in Burslem, in the Staffordshire Potteries, the daughter of John Clayton, a pottery artist.

Education

She attended Burslem School of Art from 1919 to 1924.

Career

At the Royal College she met the Welsh artist Ceri Richards. Rachel married the paleontologist Colin Patterson. Richards worked as a teacher at Camberwell School of Art and at Chelsea School of Artist

She died on 14 February 1985.

She worked as a pottery designer at the Paragon China company while a student at Burslem School of Artist At the Royal College of Art she specialised in tempera and fresco painting, studying the writings of the early Italian renaissance painter Cennino Cennini.

She continued to paint in tempera after leaving the college. Her work appears to have been little influenced by her husband"s painting.

Mel Gooding writes:

..for over fifty years her own quiet and formalised figurative art was unaffected by her daily closeness to the extravagant and sometimes violent drama of Richards"s painting.

Painting, including tempera

Illustration

Printmaking

Embroidered fabric panels (toiles brodées)

Richards"s work was shown in many solo and two-person exhibitions, including:

1945 (1945) – Redfern Gallery, London

1949 (1949) – Toiles brodées by Frances Richards, Redfern Gallery, London

1950 (1950) – Toiles brodées by Frances Richards, Hannover Gallery, London

1954 (1954) – Redfern Gallery, London

1964 (1964) – Tempera Printing by Frances Richards, Leicester Gallery, London

1969 (1969) – Leicester Gallery, London

1972 (1972) – Ceri Richards Paintings and Drawings, Frances Richards Flower Paintings, Aldeburgh Festival, Snape, Suffolk

1975 (1975) – Ceri and Frances Richards Paintings and Drawings, Patrick Searle Gallery, London

1978 (1978) – Paintings by Frances Richards (concurrent with Ceri Richards Retrospective Exhibition), Bruton Gallery, Bruton, Somerset

1980 (1980) – Frances Richards, paintings, drawings, engravings, lithographs, embroideries, from 1926 to 1979, Campbell and Franks Gallery, London

1981 (1981) – Frances Richards and Jonathon Gibbs, Holsworthy Gallery, London

Richards" work is in public collections, including:

Tate

Victoria and Albert Museum

National Museum Cardiff

Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea.

Achievements

• She won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London, where she studied from 1924 to 1927.

Interests

• Artists

  She admired the early Italian renaissance painters Giotto, Piero della Francesca and Fra Angelico. The British artists Samuel Palmer, William Blake and David Jones. And the poetry of the Psalms, the Song of Solomon, George Herbert and Arthur Rimbaud.