After leaving Camberwell, Richard continued to do some teaching at the RA schools but that very soon came to an end. 
In February 1968 Arthur Tooth gave him a solo show. Having a London dealer and actually selling pictures again after a 10-year hiatus gave him renewed energy at the age of 65.

He and Mavis began regular visits to Lepe Beach which was  just 5 miles away. It looked across the Solent to the Isle of Wight opposite and on the left the shipping for Southampton and the oil refinery manoeuvred round to go up Southampton Water. Richard found the oil tankers most interesting. He said  ' I do find the big tankers . . .  extremely beautiful. . . . the scale of them with other shipping as they emerge up through mist . . . they seem absolutely enormous."  He himself acknowledged that the days of the romantic graceful ships were gone.

Richard’s grandson later took up that theme: '. . . It seemed to me that the war was the time where Papa’s understanding of the sea matured; before the war his images were filled with comfortable renderings of beautiful ships in the last days of sail, close to home and safe haven in port. With the war the brutish conquest of the sea became more apparent with dark smudges battling elemental forces with no sight of home or respite. The rusty utility of naval and merchant ships [he] subsequently portrayed with the insight of personal experience, the romantic association gone.'

In 1970 he experimented with the odd feeling of seeing the sea tipped up as a vertical plane, with the horizon like the top of a wall, and he painted strange nude figures clambering on it. There is a playfulness but also a sense of a metaphysical exploration pervading many of these pictures.

Richard was also a great letter writer and had several long correspondences. There were the early ones with his patron Sydney Schiff and with Edward Wadsworth but also a lifelong one with the teacher who had inspired him at Bradford Grammar School, Sydney Pearson, and later with his friend and fellow RA, Bernard Dunstan. As Richard was visiting London less frequently, Bernard kept him up to date with all the local scandal as well as continuing their discussions about art.

Richard was proud of the quality and standard of work that Southampton Art Gallery had acquired over the years and he sat on the selection committee. Margery Clarke of the First Gallery, Southampton, noted that . . . 'He was a man of few words and those would be to the point.  As chairman of Southampton Art Gallery’s Smith Bequest Selection Committee, he would sit surveying what was on offer whilst the others continued to discuss them.  Then he would just say:  “We’ll have that one… ”, which they did.’

In 1971 he and Mavis visited Philippa who was living in Switzerland with her husband Manfred, a doctor at the Kinderspital, Zürich. Although only there for a few days, 6 paintings  came out of that visit, a very different landscape from his other work.

Tooth’s gave him 2 more solo shows up to 1973 and a few paintings in group shows till the gallery closed shortly afterwards when it was suggested he move to The Fine Art Society. His first solo exhibition with them took place in 1977.

In 1973 Philippa and Manfred had moved to Leeds but within a few weeks Manfred died of cancer. Philippa with a 2-yr old and a one month old baby came to live with Richard and Mavis. They built an extension for her where she lived for the next 3 years and amazingly Richard kept solidly painting through all the upheaval.

Crispin was also ill though he was mis-diagnosed for many years. Eventually it was found that he had a brain tumour. He had an operation but the cancer was too advanced. He was nursed by Richard and Mavis till he died in 1976. Richard gave his much-treasured Christopher Wood painting to Southampton Art Gallery in memory of Crispin.

Through the 70s the human figure on a beach either nude or clothed, in mixed and often strange groups, became a new theme to explore. His former attention to detail became less marked and the brush strokes more lively.

Then, with the help of the FAS, on November 29th 1979 a major retrospective exhibition organised by Bradford Art Galleries & Museums opened in Cartwright Hall, Bradford and toured through 1980 to Southampton, London and Glasgow. 112 paintings were on show.

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.'