Frederick Charles Richards RE, ARCA (1878 - 1932)

Biography

Frederick Charles Richards (b. Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, UK 1878 - d. Hampstead, London, UK 1932) attended an elementary school, remaining as a pupil teacher under headmaster Abraham Morris and studied at the local school of art spending his holidays training in studios at St Ives, Cornwall and at Bruges. In 1909, with a scholarship, he studied at the Royal College of Art, South Kensington and was a painter in colour, but his tutor Sir Frank Short (1857-1945), turned him to etching. Richards exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy in 1911, then obtained his diploma from the Royal College of Art and a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Painters-Etchers. In 1911 he was commissioned to copy Sir Edwin Poynter's cartoon of St David for the Ceiriog Memorial Institute. In 1913, publishers Adam and Charles Black employed him to make drawings for the 'Oxford Sketch Book' which was the first of a series of reproductions of pencil drawings which included Eton and Windsor, Florence, Venice and Rome. Between 1920-27 he taught at the Royal College of Art. He exhibited five etchings at the Ipswich Fine Art Club in 1923 Spadaria, Venice, Rue Voltaire, Chinon, The Street of the Forgotten Names, When I was Last at Ludlow and Sienna. Richards lived in Egypt (1927-31) and worked at subjects in the Near East, holding exhibitions at Alexandria and Teheran, presenting twenty-one of his Oriental etchings to his native town.