We are delighted to announce that Paul Richards's portrait of Connaught Brown director Anthony Brown has been donated to the Ben Uri Gallery & Museum in London.
The Ben Uri Gallery & Museum is a registered charity and the only specialist art museum in Europe addressing universal and ever-more central issues of identity and migration through the visual arts. Emerging from and representing the Jewish community, the collection principally reflects the work, lives and contribution of British and European artists of Jewish descent, interpreted within the wider context of twentieth and twenty-first century art history, politics and society.
Forming part of Richards's celebrated 'Oxford Drawings' series of psychologically charged human figures, animals and birds; 'Portrait of Anthony' delves into the essential nature of being. As a tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art, Richards belongs to a long list of distinguished artists who have taught there, including Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud and Stanley Spencer, and like whom he has developed an expressionist style with which to explore the human form. Bordering on abstraction, Richards captures the very essence of his sitters through nuances of line and seemingly spontaneous, gestural marks. Moved by a book of Rembrandt’s ink drawings which he received as a gift, Richards recognised in the portraits ‘images of thought, more powerful than Freudian analysis’. Inspired by these works, as well as the collection of Old Master drawings in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, he began to use just pen, ink and water in order to get ‘as close to the subject as possible’. Working increasingly from memory, Richards’s searching drawings reveal the emotional connection which exists between himself and his subjects.
Ben Uri Gallery & Museum
108A Boundary Road
London NW8 0RH