Perhaps best known for his close and sustained relationship with the painter David Bomberg, Miles Richmond was both a founding member of the Borough Group and the only member to work closely with Bomberg during the final years of his life. Bomberg acted as Richmond's artistic and philosophical mentor and, as such, Richmond's early work strongly echoed that of his teacher. Indeed, it was only following Bomberg's death in 1957 that Richmond found the freedom to explore his own artistic identity. His works became freer and more experimental, with a greater emphasis on colour. Throughout this transformative process, his engagement with the energy surrounding each place he depicted remained a constant - a feat only achievable through Richmond's unwavering practice of working outdoors, directly from the landscape. It was through focusing on energy, rather than form or mass that Richmond was able to capture a landscape’s distinct spirit, translating the often ineffable effect a magnificent place can have on the human mind and body into visual form.
Miles Richmond was born in 1922 in Isleworth, just outside of London. While his father worked as an engineer, he encouraged Richmond’s early passion for art, taking his son to museums and galleries from a young age. Richmond’s fascination with nature similarly grew out of his relationship with his father, recalling some of his earliest memories as being on countryside walks together, often being carried on his father's shoulders while admiring the splendid views visible from this height. Indeed, Richmond’s love for the outdoors was such that, before he decided to devote himself to painting, he had wanted to work as a farmer. In his teenage years, he spent many months working ten-hour days with a local market farmer, but soon realised it was more the forms of landscape and sensations of the elements that captivated him. It was from this experience that he decided to become a painter.
The outbreak of World War II somewhat delayed Richmond's artistic plans, although he would make an effort to practice painting and drawing in any spare minute he could find. Immediately following the war, Richmond enrolled at the Kingston Art School, and was later encouraged by several art student friends to attend the art classes of David Bomberg at The Borough Polytechnic (now London South Bank University), becoming a regular student there around 1947.
Bomberg's teaching methods were somewhat unorthodox and his classes have been described as nothing less than a personal crusade to stimulate integrity in his students, who often faced practical instruction couched in spiritual, even gnomic terms. Whether they were drawing models in the studio or bombed-out views from the roof, Bomberg encouraged his students to weigh their need for expression against intuition and direct observation; only then would they achieve both form and the idea of form, i.e. its energy, movement, and mass. As Frank Auerbach, a former classmate of Richmond, explained: ‘[Bomberg] had this sort of idiom that allowed one to go for the essence at the very beginning, to adumbrate a figure in ten minutes and then… find different terms in which to re-state it until one got something… This wasn’t a question of display; this was a question of a private quest, which had certain results.’ Richmond was initially skeptical of Bomberg's approach to teaching, but his many figure studies from this time demonstrate his attempts to adopt Bomberg's ideals.
His works in oil, notably his 1948 painting Borough Portrait Study, further demonstrate the profound influence of Bomberg in shaping Richmond’s artistic practice, with its strong directional geometry and interplay of line. It was in the same year Richmond painted this portrait that he joined Bomberg, Cliff Holden, Dorothy Mead and Edna Mann in forming the Borough Group and, until 1951, he continued to study, work, debate and exhibit with them, along with additional members Dennis Creffield, Lilian Holt, Leslie Marr, Dinora Mendelson, Dorothy Missen and Susanna Richmond.
By 1951 the Group had disbanded, and the following year Richmond left England after marrying fellow student, Susanna Richmond (no relation). The couple first went to Aix-en-Provence, in a kind of pilgrimage to Cézanne - another artist whose work had a less direct but nonetheless significant impact on Richmond’s painting practice - but left almost immediately for the Málaga coast, where they heard that Bomberg was also now in Spain. With his future teaching prospects in England severely limited, Bomberg had moved to Ronda in southern Andalusia where he intended to set up an art school, requesting Richmond to join him as his assistant. Significantly, Bomberg no longer wanted to teach in a conventional studio setting but felt it was necessary for students to paint outside in order to "rediscover that the world was round and there was a way out through sunlight."
While Bomberg’s art school was never realised, Richmond did move to Ronda to work with him. Richmond remained in Ronda for many years and in the last years of Bomberg’s life the two men became close friends. Living as neighbours at Virgen de la Cadeza, just outside the city, they met regularly to discuss art and philosophy, and occasionally made painting trips to nearby sites and villages. Richmond’s nearly continuous engagement with Bomberg and his now profound understanding of Bomberg’s philosophy is stylistically very evident in his early Spanish landscapes, which are remarkably similar to those of his friend. This study of Ronda in charcoal and chalks shows the strong linear scaffolding and almost confrontational approach to the view typical of Bomberg’s late Spanish paintings. Moreover, the picture is wholly consistent with other landscapes that Richmond painted during his first years in Ronda.
However, following Bomberg’s death in 1957, Richmond began one of his most intensely experimental and prolific periods, painting landscapes of Ronda and the surrounding areas that are as diverse as they are dramatic. Working in an animated, chromatic style that is distinct from most of his earlier work, he painted numerous views of Ronda and its environs, studying repeatedly the cliff face, the gorge, and the nearby villages of Montejaque and Grazalema at different times of day, from various angles, and in all weathers. He believed that by restoring the primacy of drawing, not only painting directly from the landscape but experiencing the landscape with all the senses, he could grasp the most effective means of communicating both the internal and external realities of nature.
Richmond had always agreed with Bomberg’s conviction that to give form to imagination, artists must engage their senses on a profound level. However, his concept of the essential differed, and in fact the two artists had often debated whether finding ‘the spirit in the mass’ depended upon reading form or its energy. While Bomberg maintained that gravity was the divine unifying force behind the universe, Richmond increasingly adopted William Blake’s belief that everything has its own vortex of energy. Indeed, in some of these paintings, he almost appears to have ‘atomised’ the landscape. In Mountains in the Moonlight, near Ronda, he used loose, thick brushstrokes and strong diagonals to challenge the weight of the horizon, and his employment of primary colours throughout has been used to almost diffract the rock face of the plateau, making it crackle with suggested energy. Richmond's fascination with the effects of light at different times of day is perhaps not coincidental given that his increasing awareness of light developed concomitantly with both groundbreaking investigations into wave-particle duality and the rise of popular science in Britain. His diffuse treatment of form and his lifelong amateur interest in science suggests that Richmond possibly understood the basic concept behind wave-particle duality: that light behaves as both a consistent wave and as discrete quanta of energy.
By the late 1960s, Richmond had produced a large body of work, but remained reluctant to exhibit in London. This was largely because he believed his paintings to still be too similar to Bomberg’s, a perception that changed definitively around 1969, when he met Harry Thubron. Thubron was both an artist and a formative art educator who, inspired by the Bauhaus and the writing of Herbert Read, encouraged students to achieve visual literacy in addition to technical skills. He became close friends with Richmond and reintroduced him to the possibilities of colour theory. Having long questioned what would remain of his work if it were stripped of Bomberg’s influence, Richmond now decided to exorcise this influence. He had always based his work on line and form and now wanted to intuit colour, so he stopped drawing and painting almost entirely and instead made colour exercises. In an effort to find his own vehicle for communicating both actualities and ideas he followed the practice of Johannes Itten, Paul Klee and other Bauhaus masters and filled notebooks with abstract, largely geometric diagrams to illustrate various contrasts of colour saturation, extension, complements and value.
By the early 1970s, when he fully returned to painting and had also returned to England with his family, Richmond’s style had changed further still, with forms now achieved through an interlay of primary colour planes and swirling brushwork, often emphasised by a gestural under-drawing. The Oak at Chipperfield shows a dramatic shift in palette towards what appears to be an RGB colour model: an additive method in which three colours – one red, one green and one blue – are joined to produce one colour whose intensity depends on its relationship to black or white.
Throughout this artistic transformation, Richmond never ceased working outside, painting on site in the English landscape. Age and the elements had no apparent effect on Richmond’s creative energy, and his distinct engagement with nature remained tireless until his death in 2008. Indeed, in the mid-1980s, Richmond travelled by camper van throughout North Yorkshire, painting views outdoors in all weathers. These landscapes are testament to Richmond's commitment to translating the essence of a place into visual form. In Whitby, where land and sky combine in a swirling mass of energy and colour, perspective has almost totally collapsed and foreground and background are intermingled, revealing Richmond's remarkable gift to simultaneously see through and capture the veil of natural phenomena.
A fully illustrated catalogue for our summer exhibition of British Impressionism is available to buy online and from our gallery in St. James's
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