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.