Richard's 'Paintings for Children' show at the Redfern Gallery opened in April 1945, right on the heels of the family tragedies in February and March.
He thought that making paintings with children in mind might help reinvigorate his imagination - 'I had always wanted to indulge in free fantasy and humour occasionally and this seemed to me a good way of liberating it besides giving a freedom and opening up ideas in my serious work.'
Richard was feeling exhausted. He wanted "a slight change after four or five years of painting at really considerable tension . . . I think perhaps the need for certain exactness in the war paintings, in spite of the imaginative ones that I did, began to pall on me to a certain extent . . . I think I wanted things to be more imaginative but I hadn’t seen my way to it . . . various family things had happened like my father dying and a small baby daughter dying within a few weeks of each other, and I felt a change somehow was necessary . . . and I did change.
Richard's efforts were rewarded: "I think almost every one . . . was sold".
As the War staggered to an end, Richard felt the tension drain away and a new energy emerge where he would not have to work with such accuracy and let his imagination roam free! However there was the small matter of having to earn a living. He was fortunate in that the war work had built him a reputation, and he was in demand, but he now faced a stream of commissions most of which entailed the same degree of accuracy and truth to detail he was hoping to move away from.
First amongst these commissions, one that occupied him for six months, was the knighting of the provost of Eton on the chapel steps by King George VI. The event had already taken place in March 1945. A little while later Colonel Astor on behalf of the Old Etonians asked him if he would paint the occasion. Five hundred pounds had been raised towards the project. Richard duly visited the provost and at some point also visited the Queen and princesses at Windsor Castle to make notes about their dresses and have lunch with them.
It was a gruelling commission and he had to imagine the event. He managed to lighten the task by including a few mischievous choirboys in the crowd of two hundred: 'I introduced quite a number of humorous things in it, like a small boy with a catapult in the front row, for instance, who was being restrained by some other boys, and one or two Etonian hats that were being knocked off. None of this was objected to, I’m very glad to say, by the officials or Royalty.’
Meanwhile in January he had received a commission from Kenneth Harrison for two pictures of King’s College, Cambridge to occupy him in the summer. Nevertheless his diary shows that through March he somehow was painting his own ideas from imagination and trying to shed the habit of tight realistic detail: 'I find I may be too much occupied with technical problems and must broaden out. Try to get the feeling of wonder, how else can one expect to move a beholder if not moved oneself?'
The Eton picture was finally displayed at the RA at the end of April 1946 where it was spotted by Vincent Massey, the Canadian High Commissioner and chair of the Tate's board of governors. Massey had been at Balliol College Oxford, and wanted a painting to fit a specific wall in the college which was to show the quad during wartime when servicemen and women came there for short study periods. As in the Eton picture, a few formal portraits were required which Richard always found difficult.
But on June 1st, 1946 the Mayor of Westminster rang Richard to ask him to paint the ceremony where Churchill was given the freedom of Westminster. This wasn’t finished until the end of March 1947 and he had found it a hard and unsatisfying slog. The end of September finds him working on the painting in London to improve the portraits and then finally varnishing it on the 8th October.
Back on 4th March, Philippa was born: the 2nd anniversary of the death of Joanna. Six months later Mavis fell out of the loft, breaking her elbow in many places and in hospital for a week. Crispin was old enough to stay at home but various neighbours took the girls for a few weeks.
In November, free from commissions for a while, Richard painted with a renewed confidence. On 1st January 1948 having been paid for the Balliol picture Richard noted: ‘I can work all this year on my own which I haven’t done for about 8 years. The interior of King's College Chapel is the only job I have in front of me.’
However, when he took his recent pictures up to the Redfern in March they were greeted with less than enthusiasm: 'What I can’t understand is that they say the development is surprising. I am quite unaware of it and can’t see what the difficulty is. They seem to think in the atomic age everyone must do abstract work! But what reasoning there is behind this I don’t know. It seems to me to be a shelter for the incompetent and shallow-minded.’ Later he admitted that he liked some abstract art but was angry at the assumption that there was no room for anything else.
In June, Richard's old friend H.H. Newton offered to pay for a new studio for him. Later in the year he met up with another friend Leonard Daniels who had recently been made head of Camberwell School of Art. Leonard offered him a job there teaching one day a week. It wasn’t until the following year when he suggested two days a week that it became a viable option given the cost of travel and income tax. With a family of three children the cost of living was becoming more of a problem.
In March 1949 Richard had another show at the Redfern but only sold four pictures. However the following month the artist Robert Buhler wrote to him saying his work at the RA summer show was much admired:' He also says the general feeling among the painters is that it was refreshing to see someone working in their own way.’
In late September Richard spent three days in Yorkshire, staying in Malham, exploring Gordale Scar and the Cove: 'Looking down into the Cove, had the most frightening sensation of being sucked in, and retreated at once.’ Several paintings were subsequently based on the sketches done there. On September 23rd he wrote, "To Gordale Scar in the morning and made a drawing at the bottom looking up through the watercourse. A long upright panel might be made interesting" [Gordale Scar(1950)]. On the 26th he started teaching at Camberwell.