Signed and dated gouache with pen and ink on paper.
Music played a vital part in the life of Ceri Richards – painter, printmaker and himself a gifted pianist.

From the collection of Stanley Jones.

Ceri Richards was introduced to music at an early age. His father was a conductor for the local choir and encouraged his children to play the piano and sing. Richards became an accomplished pianist and played piano accompaniments for concerts and in chapel during his teenage years. He continued to play throughout his adulthood and was often involved in Chamber music duets, trios and quartets.

It is therefore no surprise that music played a major role in his artistic life. Mel Gooding explains in his recent book on the artist, 'He was peculiarly sensitive to music, being both a passionate listener and highly accomplished executant, capable of sustained and inventive improvised compositions. From childhood, music was a central to his imaginative life.' (Mel Gooding, Ceri Richards, Cameron & Hollis, Scotland, 2002, p.8).

In the 1950s he painted a number of works paying homage to Beethoven, his favourite composer. He later went on to produce a series based on Debussy's prelude 'La Cathédrale, Engloutie'. However, the theme dominating a large portion of his work was The Music Room, usually depicting a piano and solo female pianist. Richards produced a large body of work from this theme, which first appeared during the war years and continued throughout the 1940s. The figure is always depicted as female, usually alone and absorbed in the music she is playing, unaware she is being observed. Gooding notes a similarity between these works and the interiors of the Dutch artist, Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675): 'The female figures in Richard's interiors, in silent reverie or engrossed in music, are similarly absorbed, similarly significant of an otherness, a self-contained completeness of existence. There are no males in this richly imagined domain'. (Op.Cit.p.98).