Ceri Richards

Ceri Giraldus Richards (6 June 1903 – 9 November 1971) was a Welsh painter, print-maker and maker of reliefs.

In 1929 he married Frances Clayton, a fellow artist. They had two daughters – Rachel (born 1932) and Rhiannon (born 1945). Rachel married the paleontologist Colin Patterson.

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.

In the 1940s Richards began a career-long engagement with the work of his compatriot Dylan Thomas, creating works of art inspired by his poetry. These include three paintings collectively entitled, from the poem of the same name, The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, which he later reworked into lithographs and published in 1947. After Thomas’s death in 1953, Richards produced a series of works under the rubric Homage to Dylan Thomas. In 1965 he created Twelve Lithographs for Dylan Thomas.

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.

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

He designed stained glass windows for Derby Cathedral (1964–65), and for the Blessed Sacrament Chapel of Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral (1965).