Frances Richards (néeClayton; 1 August 1903 - 14 February 1985) was a British painter,
embroiderer, and illustrator.
Biography
Frances Clayton was born in 1903 in
Burslem, in the
Staffordshire Potteries, the daughter of John Clayton, a pottery artist.[1][2] Both sides of the Clayton family were from long-established pottery working families.[3] Richards attended the
Burslem School of Art from 1919 to 1924, initially on a part-time basis. She worked as a pottery designer at the
Paragon China company while a student at Burslem.[2][3]: 17 She won an annual national scholarship to the
Royal College of Art in London for students who had worked in industry.[3] She studied at the RCA from 1924 to 1927 and specialised in
tempera and
fresco painting and studied the writings of the early
Italian Renaissance painter
Cennino Cennini.[4][3]: 17 While at the RCA Richards won a sculpture prize and demonstrated mould-making techniques to other students.[3] She continued to paint in tempera after leaving the college. At the Royal College she met the Welsh artist
Ceri Richards. They married in July 1929 and had two daughters, Rachel (born 1932) and Rhiannon (born 1945). Rachel married paleontologist
Colin Patterson.[5]
From 1928 to 1939, Richards worked as a teacher in the textile department at the
Camberwell School of Art.[6][7] During the 1930s Richards exhibited with the
London Group and in 1937 produced decorations for the
P&O cruise liner
Orcades.[7]
During
World War II, Richards and her husband moved to
Alphamstone in Essex and she taught at Furzedown Training College in
Tooting. Later in the war, the college was relocated to
Cardiff where, by coincidence, Ceri Richards had taken the post of Head of Painting at the
Cardiff School of Art.[3] After the war Frances returned to work at Camberwell School of Art, and taught there for almost 30 years during which time she also worked at the
Chelsea School of Art.[4][6]
During the 1950s and 1960s Richards was a regular exhibitor at several commercial galleries in London, including the
Hanover Gallery, the
Leicester Galleries and, in particular, the
Redfern Gallery.[6][3] Richards was a keen reader of poetry, particularly the work of
William Blake, and her exhibition catelogues often contained poems or verse. In 1980, the Campbell & Franks Gallery in London held a large retrospective exhibition with paintings, drawings, engravings, embroideries and early tempera works from over fifty years of her artistic career.[8] The
Tate in London holds several pieces by Richards including her 1957
tempera painting Left and Right of the Long Path.[8]
She died on 14 February 1985, aged 81.[4] In 2019, an exhibition of her work was held in the
Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea.[9]
...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 [Ceri] Richards's painting.
The Acts of the Apostles (from the
Holy Bible). In The Fleuron, A Journal of Typography, vol 7, editor
Stanley Morison. Cambridge University Press, 1930; New York, Doubleday Page, 1930. Richards made further illustrations to Acts which were published in 1980.[4]