Ceri Richards at Gregynog

In 1923, Ceri Richards was taken to visit Gregynog Hall where the Davies sisters entertained students from Swansea College of Arts. There he saw Monet, Manet and Renoir’s paintings for himself. “Imagine their effect on someone who’d dreamed of a great painting, but had seen none.” This remarkable private collection was, a few years later, to become the core of the National Museum of Wales’s French collection as we now know it. 

These paintings were life-changing for the son of a steel worker from Dunvant who had barely left that area. That young man would go on to be an artist collected by Gwendoline and Margaret Davies; then to become a Trustee of The Tate Gallery, a C.B.E. and to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1961. His “Cathedrale Engloutie” works would be awarded the Einaudi Prize that year in Venice. 

When I interviewed Gwen Watkins in 2002, she said that these late works were in the spirit of her husband Vernon Watkins: They both “responded to the miraculous and eternal and sacred.”

Some ten years after that Gregynog visit, Ceri Richards began to read the poetry of Dylan Thomas; in 1945 he provided a double-sided colour lithograph for the Poetry London magazine, four stunning images from Dylan’s great poem “The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drive the Flower” – a visualising of the Dylan metaphors that would drive Richards’s own painting force and also give insights into the work of the poet.

Alfred Janes, a mutual friend of Ceri and Dylan was to introduce the artist to the poet on a visit to the Boathouse in Laugharne: both men immediately responded to each other as persons and artists. They planned to collaborate on a future project. But that was in the late summer of 1953 and within weeks Dylan would be dead in a New York hospital. 

When, in the following February, an evening of tribute was organised in a London theatre, it was Ceri Richards who designed the backcloth to those readings. Ceri’s versions of “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” are the most moving of those responses.

Alfred Janes, a mutual friend of Ceri and Dylan was to introduce the artist to the poet on a visit to the Boathouse in Laugharne: both men immediately responded to each other as persons and artists. They planned to collaborate on a future project. But that was in the late summer of 1953 and within weeks Dylan would be dead in a New York hospital. 

When, in the following February, an evening of tribute was organised in a London theatre, it was Ceri Richards who designed the backcloth to those readings. Ceri’s versions of “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” are the most moving of those responses.

Ceri wrote a report of the tribute for Vernon Watkins: “Betty Lutyens doesn’t possess the appropriate spirit for it… Edith Evans as a reader was completely out her depth - Emlyn Williams was good but not so good as in the rehearsal…” However, “R. Burton read ‘Fern Hill’ very well. Obviously, he loved this poem and knew it inside out so to speak and that is very important.”

He ends with the P.S., “Whatever would Dylan say or think if he was able to see what is happening – he would perhaps blow the froth off his celestial beer at us and say we blasphemed – and that we took his name in vain – but he would like it if he feels we do it for love.”

For the remaining two decades of his life, Ceri Richards returned again and again to the poems of Dylan Thomas; his art was inspired by admiration and love of the Swansea poet’s words.

When I interviewed Fred Janes for my book Welsh Artists Talking (2001) he told me his Boathouse story. Fred had been one of the “Kardomah boys” and a “wonderful friend” of Richards’s in London. Janes considered his friend to be “the most creative and inventive British painter of this century”. Though he thought that Dylan had not known of Ceri’s work, “In 1953, we saw him two or three days before he left for America that last time. He’d never met Ceri, so Mary and I took him down to Dylan at the Boathouse, in Laugharne. I had a lovely little Sunbeam Talbot drop-head coupe at that time…I don’t think Dylan was terribly well acquainted with Ceri’s work."

Dylan Thomas had first been taken to the Boathouse in the 1930s by his friends Glyn Jones when they ferried across the estuary from the Llansteffan side.

Gregynog Hall and the Boathouse: those two encounters were to galvanise Ceri Richards and secured his mature vision. He was to become the most significant and international-acclaimed painter from Wales and one of the most sensitive intelligent interpreters of Wales’s greatest poet. He was also a close friends of Dylan’s friend Vernon Watkins and created works inspired by “the other Swansea poet”.

It is intriguing to speculate what might have become of the relationship between Thomas and Richards. Certainly, the untimely death of Dylan Thomas impacted dramatically on the painter. Ceri Richards, hearing of Dylan’s collapse and coma, bought four copies of the Collected Poems and began to re-read the poems, drawing copiously on the pages of the books in the days before Dylan’s death. Three copies survive and it is from these that the poet Richard Burns has re-constructed Ceri Richards – Drawings to Poems by Dylan Thomas and has written the accompanying monograph. Burns explains that he discovered, with great surprise and excitement the existence of the drawings when collaborating with Frances Richards on a separate publishing project. 

In that time of loss, the rereading and those drawings of Dylan informed much of the artist’s later works.

In a series of profound and visionary works, the mature Ceri Richards wove together images of birds and manuscripts and skulls and bodies -nature forcing re-birth through the cycles of nature that would be the unequalled by any other British artist of the Twentieth Century. Drowned cathedrals would arise from the waves. 

No serious collector of Welsh art should be without a work by Ceri Richards.

Prof. Tony Curtis

Poet, author, and professor of poetry, former winner of The Dylan Thomas Award.

The Summer Welsh Sale to be held on July 26th is now online to view