This is the first major publication on the life and work of one of the most important British artists of the twentieth century. Ceri Richards, born in Wales in 1903, was a draughtsman of genius and a painter of rare energy and imagination. It was while he was training at the Royal College of Art in London in the mid 1920s that his life-long, fiercely intelligent engagement with modern European painting began. He read and was deeply affected by Kandinsky and responded at the most profound level to the work of Picasso, Matisse and Ernst. In the 1930s, Richards made a number of relief constructions and paintings that constitute a major contribution to Surrealism and rank with the best European art of the period. Simultaneously, however, he developed an intensely lyrical vision of the everyday world in which brilliant colour, refracted light and an exuberant visual music express a keen appreciation of the joy to be found in domestic or urban living. Few artists of his time have encompassed such oppositions of subject and mood. Richards's extraordinary versatility enabled him to shift styles and to treat his subjects with a dazzling virtuosity. Mel Gooding has pieced together a remarkab