Ceri Richards

Acquired by Wilfrid A. Evill October 1954 for £100.0.0, by whom bequeathed to Honor Frost in 1963

London, Redfern Gallery, 1950, cat. no.3, illustrated in the catalogue;
London, Burlington Galleries, British Painting 1925-50 First Anthology, 1951, cat. no.76, illustrated in the catalogue, with tour to Manchester City Art Gallery;
Sao Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna, Second Biennial Exhibition, 1st September 1953 - 1st June 1954, cat. no.73, with British Council tour;
London, Whitechapel Gallery, Ceri Richards retrospective, 1960, cat. no.34 (as Purple Interior with Pianist);
London, The Home of Wilfrid A. Evill, Contemporary Art Society, Pictures, Drawings, Water Colours and Sculpture, April - May 1961, (part II- section 2) cat. no.4 (as Seated Figure and Piano) (probably);
Brighton, Brighton Art Gallery, The Wilfrid Evill Memorial Exhibition, June - August 1965, cat. no.144;
London, Tate Gallery, Ceri Richards, July - September 1981, cat. no.53.

The colours are much fresher and less orange, notably the background colour is more violet in tone, than the printed catalogue suggests. Original canvas. The upper half of the right-hand edge undulates very slightly. There is a minor spot of paint loss along the left side of the upper edge, just to the right of the yellow window. There are a few very minor isolated spots of staining to the surface, but has recently been lightly cleaned. Otherwise the work appears in excellent overall condition. Under ultraviolet light certain areas fluoresce but these appear to be the hand of the artist. Held in a gilt plaster frame with a canvas inset. Please telephone the department on +44 (0)20 7293 6424 if you have any questions about the present work.
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Ceri Richards had a great love for and understanding of music and he first used the subject of the pianist when in Cardiff during the war. By 1950 the domesticity of the pianist and piano paintings, in which the artist often portrayed his wife Frances playing the piano, had transformed into a more surreal and abstracted treatment of the subject matter.

Shadows in a Room is a particularly surreal depiction. The room (Richard's house in Wandsworth) pulsates with energy and lyricism and yet the heavily abstracted seated figure turns away from the instrument. She is not playing the instrument or making any music. Instead the anthropomorphic piano attracts most attention in the centre of the composition where it seems to dance and make its own music.

The human figure is a cold outline compared to the life and soul of the piano and the rest of the vibrant interior. The wallpaper is bold and extravagant, the foliate patterns dancing off the walls. The blue door to the right recedes so violently that it floats as a free object against the flat matt of the purple pigment of the wall. A window in the upper left appears like a broken pane of glass, fragmenting the rays of light that distinguish the blindingly bright outside from the shadows of inside, a point Richards emphasises in the title of the painting.

Interestingly an old image of the painting found in the Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art shows an earlier version of the present work where the figure is much more clearly outlined.