In 1949 the artist William Coldstream who had been a teacher at Camberwell Art School left to become professor at the Slade. Other staff had moved on too. This created a gap for the principal of Camberwell, Leonard Daniels, to offer Richard a couple of days teaching each week. Two days made it worthwhile financially, so on the 26th September 1949 Richard started at Camberwell. The first day of helping about 50 students with life drawing was a bit daunting. But he wrote that ‘the evening class had about 15 students which made things easier, and found them rather an interesting lot.’
Richard later said that the experience of teaching revived him considerably and eventually pushed him to be a bit more experimental himself. He acknowledged that he wasn’t really cut out to be a teacher, ". . . it was not teaching but encouragement that the students very often required. I found that if I allowed students to talk it helped them very often. I would just listen and make a few remarks here and there." A few years later filling in a form about student aims he said, with the agreement of his colleague Philip Mathews ". . . that we believed in students painting still life etc., with a view to discovering the design as they went along. That composition was something to be found out and not superimposed by theories."
In March 1950 the new studio was finally completed. At first he was a little wary, '. . . the light is wonderful and certainly shows up the defects of my paintings.’ (!) But he soon grew into it and loved it.
In March 1951 the Redfern held a show of seventeen of his recent pictures but only one sold, and that one went at half price in sympathy for an admirer of his work who could not afford the full amount. He observed wryly: 'The Society folk who are holding shows in the adjoining galleries are doing well after having thrown expensive cocktail parties.’
A couple of months later Richard put four of the pictures from the Redfern show into the RA summer exhibition, and two of them sold. But it was a new painting he submitted that really made a stir. 'A Judgment’, a cascade of musical instruments, was a great critical success and also sold. A few days before the opening he was "asked by ‘The Sphere’ [magazine] if they could reproduce my painting of ‘A Judgment’ in colour, full page. I said 'yes!'. "
1951 was the year of the Festival of Britian. To mark the occasion Bradford City Art Gallery decided to mount an exhibition of works by Bradford Artists, 1851-1951, the biggest part of which was to be a retrospective of Richard's work. He made new paintings for it, drew from his own store of works and many were borrowed from public and private collections. The RA show now out of the way he had the final preparations for the Bradford show to get on with. "[I] motored to Bradford with fourteen paintings, and had the experience of seeing about seventy of my paintings of the last 15 years together! What stands out a mile is that those which have been kept under glass, are in superb condition. Others are filthy, cracked and damaged."
He spent several days cleaning and varnishing. The show was opened on the 1st June (1951) by J.B. Priestley, an old Bradfordian. At the Town Hall 'a certain ‘stickiness’ in the air as a result of JB’s new novel in which he guys town clerks etc.!' At the end of the day 'I presented him with a pipe. He replied that he knew if he came often enough he would get something! He purchased the little ‘Angry Clown’ saying "That’s what we all are.’ "
The next day, over in York, Richard went to a dress rehearsal of the York Mystery Plays where his brother-in-law John Kay acted Caiaphas the High Priest. It helped provide material for his great triptych of the York Festival which he painted 5 years later.
About this time he received an odd commission from the novelist Evelyn Waugh to paint a picture called ‘The Pleasures of Travel 1951’ depicting the interior of a Dakota plane on fire and about to crash. Waugh already had two paintings forming a series, ‘The Pleasures of Travel 1751’ and 'The Pleasures of Travel 1851’ by a painter called Thomas Musgrave Joy. In each case the travellers were encountering disaster in one form or another.
Richard had embarked in the early fifties on a memoir of his childhood which broke off in 1929 at the time of his first solo show. He was always fascinated by the especial vividness of a child’s experience, the freshness and intensity. He said that a recounting of later life tended to become a litany of name-dropping, so he did not continue his story. He submitted the book written in longhand (!) to Evelyn Waugh who apparently was encouraging and said he would write an introduction but perhaps unsurprisingly this never came about.
Richard had a painting accepted into a Royal Academy Summer Show for the first time in 1937 and he was elected an Associate in the 1942. Although a lot of the politics at the RA could be maddening, Richard rather enjoyed the jovial meetings and schoolboy humour. It was also a brilliant place to be able to sell work to a wide audience at a low rate of commission and it carried prestige, so he was delighted when In April 1953 he was elected a full member of the RA.
By 1956 Richard was beginning to have health problems again. On 29th January he wrote: 'On Friday developed most painful rheumatics and sciatica in the right leg, could hardly move. Difficulty getting in and out of bed, had to ask for assistance when coming down stairs.’ This was probably the beginning of hip trouble that dogged him for many years. It was relieved by a Southampton osteopath who enabled him to walk the Forest again, and eventually he had a hip replacement.
Despite these problems he visited Rouen in 1956 where he had been invited to paint a picture of the re-dedication of the cathedral following its destruction during the war. He in fact painted several Rouen pictures that year.
The commissions Richard received in the fifties and sixties were mostly different in nature from the ones right after the war, which came mainly from the establishment reasserting itself. He was approached by more commercial clients such as the Post Office (GPO), Shell and Esso Petroleum.
In 1960 he was asked to do two huge murals for the new Teaching Hospital in Sheffield. He had never learnt to ‘square up’ in order to transfer the same proportions from a small sketch to a larger surface so he called on his elder daughter Caroline (who was studying art and had learned this skill) to help him. Closer to home, Lord Montagu asked him to paint two versions (day and then night time with fireworks) of the celebrations following the return of Francis Chichester in Gipsy Moth after her round the world trip in 1967.
His last main show at the Redfern was in 1958. Rex Nan Kivell, the director and his long term friend, was unable to sell his work, so Richard resigned his commission with Rex. He was now for the first time without a London dealer.
The commissions and the teaching helped keep Richard going, but sales of his personal work were very patchy, hardly half a dozen in some years according to his sales diary. Collectors were not so interested in represenatational work as they had been. He had mellowed a bit since his early statements about the rise of abstract painting in the late forties, but that shift was still a factor. He explained in his 1978 interview for the Imperial War Museum, "There was a great change to abstract painting which interested me to a certain extent but not for myself. I mean I like abstract paintings but there seemed to be such an enormous amount of them that might have been done by almost anybody and it spread right around the world. Everything got rather the same. I felt that I’d rather stick to what I wanted to do, which might be unfashionable, and oddly enough things do go round in a complete circle."
Richard was not unaffected by the new waves in art. By the sixties his teaching methods at Camberwell appear to have become more relaxed. He started to fill his own sketchbook with many little studies of the models and sometimes of the students at work, apparently leaving the students to get on without his supervision. He said of the Camberwell job: 'I wasn’t very good at teaching but I learnt a lot there about painting. And I think it began to revive me, you know, considerably.'
The next generation of painters was coming along without any preconceptions. He assimilated some of the students’ fresh approaches to art. For example, Richard's 1959 painting 'The Garden' seems to announce a new interest to experiment with colour and to rethink his sometimes highly detailed approach to painting. Some of his sixties paintings are remarkable for an often startling departure into strong hot colours, but also for their very different styles, keeping up his reputation as a "curiously unpredictable" artist.
Crispin, Caroline and Philippa all got married in the sixties so he felt a certain freedom from responsibility. In 1967 after nearly nineteen years of teaching at Camberwell, Richard's wife Mavis agreed readily that he could retire from the job and get back to full-time painting.
The time had come to find a London dealer again. He signed up with Dudley Tooth at the Arthur Tooth and Sons gallery. Richard records that he " . . . had built up quite an accumulation of work . . . and when Tooth's saw it, they were quite excited about it. It was sort of, I won’t say old-fashioned, but perhaps new in an old kind of way. And they felt it was a good thing." Richard raided the loft, full of years of unsold pictures, ready for his first solo show in ten years.