This is the first major publication on the life and work of one of the most important British artists of the twentieth century. Ceri Richards, born in Wales in 1903, was a draughtsman of genius and a painter of rare energy and imagination. It was while he was training at the Royal College of Art in London in the mid 1920s that his life-long, fiercely intelligent engagement with modern European painting began. He read and was deeply affected by Kandinsky and responded at the most profound level to the work of Picasso, Matisse and Ernst. In the 1930s, Richards made a number of relief constructions and paintings that constitute a major contribution to Surrealism and rank with the best European art of the period. Simultaneously, however, he developed an intensely lyrical vision of the everyday world in which brilliant colour, refracted light and an exuberant visual music express a keen appreciation of the joy to be found in domestic or urban living. Few artists of his time have encompassed such oppositions of subject and mood. Richards's extraordinary versatility enabled him to shift styles and to treat his subjects with a dazzling virtuosity. Mel Gooding has pieced together a remarkably detailed investigation of the artist's methods of working and sources of inspiration. In his informative, sensitive and readable text, Gooding weaves together a rigorous analysis of Ceri Richards's art and an intimate account of his life, tightly integrated with over a hundred fine colour illustrations of paintings, drawings and constructions and many family photographs. This handsome book will delight anyone interested in twentieth-century European art, and will win many new admirers for this most impressive British artist. It is published to coincide with a major exhibition of Richards's work at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff.