About Frederick Charles Richards
Frederick Charles Richards (1878 – 1932) was born at Newport, Monmouthshire.
He studied at his local art school, spending his spare time training in studios at St Ives, Cornwall and at Bruges.
In 1909, he was awarded a scholarship and studied at the Royal College of Art, South Kensington. He became a painter in colour, but his tutor Sir Frank Short, soon turned him to etching.
In 1911, Richards exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy, then obtained his diploma from the Royal College of Art and a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Painters-Etchers. He was then commissioned to copy Sir Edwin Poynter’s cartoon of St David for the Ceiriog Memorial Institute. Then later, 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’.
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’.