Ceri Richards - The Supper at Emmaus

Luke 24: 13–32

This is a study for the 1958 altar piece in the chapel at St Edmund Hall Oxford, although there are some differences between the study and the finished piece. Jesus sits facing the viewer, looking out of the picture, with one disciple sitting opposite him, his back to the viewer, and one on the right. The table is represented schematically as part of the yellow cross which is central to the picture.  The chair directly in front of us has four bars across the back which seem to echo the shutters at the top left of the painting. A jug, a goblet and two plates (one with three bread rolls on it) are on the table. The palette is limited to blues, yellows and greens.

Commentary based on A Guide to the Methodist Art Collection.

Born: Dunvant, Swansea, UK, 1903

Died: London, UK, 1971

Early life

Ceri Richards was the son of conductor and choir master Thomas Coslett Richards and his wife Sarah. His father worked in the tin-plate foundry in Gowerton and the family were highly cultured and musically talented.

Education

At school, Richards was interested in mechanical drawing which led him to a brief apprenticeship in an electrical firm. He moved on to study at Swansea School of Art (1921-24) and won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art (1924-27).

Life and career

Richards was originally influenced by Monet and the Impressionists, but then by Kandinsky, the Surrealists and the Futurists by the late 1930s. He then turned to a loose expressionist style in his paintings and prints. He established a major international reputation as a printmaker.

Richards lived in London until 1939 where, with other artists, he became interested in the International Modern Movement. He became associated with abstract artists such as Ben Nicholson. However, in March 1934, he showed two paintings at the Objective Abstractions exhibition and their figurative content distanced him from more purely abstract artists. In the same year, he began a series of pictorial relief constructions. The abstraction of the figures in these reliefs is comparable to those by Picasso and Hans Arp. He first exhibited these reliefs in the Surrealist Objects exhibition at the London Gallery in 1937. He took up a post in the Chelsea College of Art in the same year.

Richards moved to Cardiff in 1939, teaching graphic art at Cardiff School of Art. He produced a series of black and white drawings of tin-plate workers in South Wales.

After the war, music and poetry increasingly informed Richards’ work and he produced a series, The Cycle of Nature, in response to Dylan Thomas’s poetry. He followed these works with a number of interiors with a woman at a piano. The bright colours and rapid application of paint are reminiscent of Matisse, though the decorative surface rhythms are typical of Richards. These characteristics (together with the exaggerated hands and feet) can also be seen in the religious works he produced in the 1950s including The Deposition (1958) in St Mary’s Swansea. He won the commission to produce The Supper at Emmaus (1958-59) for the Chapel of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. The Methodist Modern Art Collection’s watercolour is related to this. Other religious commissions included fine abstract stained-glass windows for Derby Cathedral (1964-65) symbolising All Saints and All Souls and several pieces for Liverpool Roman Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral including stained glass and an altar frontal (1965).

In the 1960s Richards returned to more abstract paintings and constructions, often based on Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie. This work was mainly on a large scale, with geometrical or painterly technique and intense and unusual colour harmonies. He also continued to produce lithographs and screen prints, often with the Curwen Press.

Richards’ work was displayed in retrospective exhibitions in the Whitechapel Art Gallery (1960); the Venice Biennale (1962-63); Fischer Fine Art Ltd in 1972; and a posthumous exhibition in the Tate Gallery in 1981.

His work is represented in many collections including Arts Council, London; Tate Gallery, London; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Art+Christianity/Ecclesiart, ‘Windows, tabernacle and reredos (Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral)’. Available at: https://artandchristianity.org/ecclesiart-listings/ceri-richards-windows-reredos-tabernacle?rq=richards (viewed 18 September 2024)

David Buckman, Artists in Britain Since 1945: Volume 2 M-Z. Vol. 2 of 2 volumes, (Bristol, Art Dictionaries Ltd, 2006), p.1339-1340. The text is also available on the Art UK website: https://artuk.org/discover/artists/richards-ceri-giraldus-19031971 (viewed 18 September 2024)

Jenkins, A.D.F. ’Richards, ‘Ceri Geraldus (1903-1971)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014). Available at; https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/31602 (viewed 18 September 2024)

Seeing the Spiritual: A Guide to the Methodist Modern Art Collection, (Oxford, Methodist Modern Art Collection, 2018), p. 86-87

Roger Wollen, Catalogue of the Methodist Church Collection of Modern Christian Art with an Account of the Collection’s History, (Oxford, The Trustees of the Methodist Collection of Modern Christian Art, 2003), p. 104-108