Frances Richards née Clayton, 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. Both sides of the Clayton family were from long-established pottery working families. Richards attended 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. She won an annual national scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London for students who had worked in industry. 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. While at the RCA Richards won a sculpture prize and demonstrated mould-making techniques to other students. 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 and Rhiannon. Rachel married the paleontologist Colin Patterson. From 1928 to 1939 Richards worked as a teacher in the textile department at the Camberwell School of Art. During the 1930s Richards exhibited with the London Group and in 1937 produced decorations for the P&O cruise liner Orcades. During World War Two, 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. 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. 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. 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. The Tate in London holds several pieces by Richards including her 1957 tempera painting left and Right of the Long Path. She died on 14 February 1985. In 2019 an exhibition of her work was held in the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea.
