The Lepe Years

1980 was an eventful year. There was the large touring exhibition from Bradford and The Fine Art Society both in Glasgow and London and ending up at Southampton Art Gallery, but also a solo show at the Ash Barn Gallery with over 70 pictures. This gallery near Petersfield run by Werner Haub was a great success for Richard. It was a pleasant run in the car, not like the slog to London, and he sold well there as it attracted a clientele from London and the south of England generally.

In 1980 he painted ‘Weymouth Bay’ which the following year won the Hunting Art Prize. He was the first winner of this prize, which ran for 25 years before it relocated to Houston, Texas.

About this time Richard underwent a hip replacement operation at the Treloar Hospital near Alton. He seemed to be recovering well but suddenly suffered a thrombosis and was sent to Basingstoke Hospital as an emergency. Luckily he pulled through and still had a few years of walking on the moor.

The last 12 years of Richard’s life were among the most productive. Of course there are many small pictures but he also produced several quite monumental works (Tall Ships, The Rehearsal, Burning Bush, Moment of Sadness).
The sea dominated his output during these years but some themes appeared which were new.

Mavis regularly drove to visit the Greenham Common women usually taking a pot of stew to keep them going. In 1985 Richard painted a unique bird’s eye view of one of the main gatherings there (possibly the ‘Embrace the Base’ event in 1982) with police round the perimeter.

Mavis’ closest friend Vivien Cutting died one day while bathing at Lepe and though a young man noticed she was in difficulty and tried to rescue her, she was already dead when he got her to the shore. Mavis was there, waiting on the beach with Vivien’s little dog and the shock and grief meant no trips to Lepe for a while.

At this time Richard produced a lot of paintings of the trees in the Forest and in the back garden, and though the sea pictures continued as well, Richard’s store of impressions didn’t need constant ‘topping up’ by visiting Lepe.

Vivien’s death may have triggered fresh grief over the death of Crispin and in 1982 he painted a Lepe scene with a Crispin-like figure reclining on the beach, camera nearby, called ‘In Memoriam Crispin.'

Another new theme was a series of small, freely painted heads of people, about 10 of them (Sick Girl, Studious Youth, The Surgeon etc) all roughly the same size.

The back garden was pretty wild and Mavis loved having the occasional bonfire there of all the dead wood. Richard painted a very typical picture of her next to a small bonfire with a column of smoke spiralling up, surrounded by leafy bushes and trees.

In 1983 the Fine Art Society gave Richard a solo exhibition called ‘Eurich at 80’ which was very successful. And then in 1984 Richard had another show at Ash Barn, again exhibiting about 70 pictures. It was as if he was having to paint quite fast to fulfil demand! 

In recognition of life’s work he was honoured with an OBE in 1984. He enjoyed his short audience with the Queen whom he admired for her ability to ask questions of him with apparent real interest and grace.

In 1988, no doubt in the run-up to the following year’s doctorate from Bradford, John Sheeran at Bradford Art Galleries and Museums commissioned Leonard Rosoman RA to paint Richard’s portrait. He visited him and painted him at the time of year when all the tender plants had been brought in to over-winter in the studio. Richard had apparently just come in from the garden and was still in his rubber boots. It looked like the portrait of a gardener-artist!

In 1989 he was awarded a D. Litt by Bradford University and he seemed to enjoy the honour and the dressing up in robes and mitre board. A eulogy was read out to sum up his life’s achievement, which also referred back to his eminent father’s work against anthrax, that scourge of the sorters at the wool mills in Bradford.

That same year Richard and Mavis were in their little car driving one stormy day along the road which runs parallel to the shore at Lepe. Suddenly a huge wave engulfed the car and it stopped. Richard was 86 years old but managed to stagger to dry land while some youths carried Mavis to safety. The local newspaper even carried a photograph of the scene. Richard painted the event and called it ‘An Unusually High Tide.’ He included the car stranded in the foaming water, but the following year he painted it out. It’s a shame that there is no photograph of the original version.

Alongside these ‘eventful’ pictures Richard was developing a more minimal approach: his so-called ‘empty pictures’. In an interview for the IWM he described the return to sea painting during the last couple of decades of his life. He mentioned ships and people but said ‘…very often it’s the sea alone…’ The elemental sea could fill the picture without need of incident or focus point. These paintings are indeed amongst his most powerful.

In September 1991 The Imperial War Museum gave a retrospective exhibition of Richard’s war paintings, which he managed to attend even though he was already ill with cancer. It was truly amazing to see these works which represented a whole era of his life but which he admitted in the earlier IWM interview: 'It’s a curious thing about the war paintings. They seem a different sort of part of me sort of altogether somehow. Well, I feel that the work that I did during the war I feel now is quite a different part of me to what I am now.'