Ceri Richards (1903 – 1971)
Portrait of a Farmer
Pen and Ink on paper, 1942
39 x 29cm
Signed (twice) and inscribed Best wishes from Ceri & Frances Richards
£1,200 framed

Ceri Richards was born in Dunvant near Swansea in 1903. On leaving  school he was apprenticed to an electrical engineer, before studying at  Swansea School of Art, 1921 and then at the Royal College of Art.

Richards exhibited with the Surrealist group at the London Gallery in 1936. After election to the London Group (1937), he began exhibiting relief-constructions.
From 1940 to 1944 Richards ran the painting department at Cardiff School of Art; he was also commissioned by the Ministry of Information to make drawings of South Wales tin-plate workers. A commission to illustrate the poem ‘The force that through the green fuse’ (1933) by Dylan Thomas for Poetry London led to paintings and lithographs related to Thomas’s writings and to the work of other poets such as Vernon Watkins. His commissions as a stage designer included the décor and costumes for Lennox Berkeley’s opera Ruth and for Benjamin Britten’s Noyes Fludde, 1958). Richards’s other design projects included the tabernacle, reredos and two stained-glass windows for the Metropolitan Cathedral, Liverpool.