Lot 1716
FRANK RICHARDS (1863-1935)
CHRISTCHURCH PRIORY
Signed and dated 1892, oil on canvas
150.5 x 227cm.
Exhibited: London, The Royal Academy, 1892, no.42
Provenance: The Property of Shepton Mallet Town Council
* Richards was born in Birmingham where he studied at the School of Art. He was elected a member of the Birmingham Society of Artists in 1884, when he was just twenty one. Having travelled throughout Europe, Richards was captivated by the immediacy and honesty of plein air painting. Back in England, it soon became apparent that the newly established group of artists at Newlyn were similarly inspired and so he joined Stanhope Forbes in Cornwall. Richards would have already known the Birmingham-born artists Edwin Harris and Walter Langley who had settled in the small village and he became a regular visitor to Cornwall between 1892 and 1897, despite his dislike of Newlyn as `a filthy and smelly and somewhat lazy place`.
The picture is illustrated in `Royal Academy Pictures 1892` (p.112) from which it is apparent that the figure of the fisherman was a later addition by the artist as it does not appear in the photograph of the painting issued at the time of the exhibition (see image)
Richards held a solo exhibition at Dowdeswell Gallery, London in 1894. He was a regular exhibitor in Newlyn and St Ives and contributed to the Newlyn School exhibitions at the Castle Galleries, Nottingham and Dowdeswell Gallery, London. He also exhibited a total of three pictures at the Royal Academy.
He worked from addresses in Lulworth, Dorset (1885), Newlyn (1892), London (1897), Wareham, Dorset (1902) and Bournemouth (1917). Frank Richards died in Bournemouth on 12 October, 1935
