ARTIST: Gwilym Prichard (British, Welsh, 1931 - 2015)
NAME: Seaside Hill Town
YEAR: 1951
MEDIUM: gouache on paper
CONDITION: Very good. Normal wear to edges.
SIGHT SIZE: 19 x 15 inches / 48 x 38 cm
FRAME SIZE: unframed
SIGNATURE: lower right
NAME VARIANTS: Gwilym Pritchard
CATEGORY: antique vintage painting
SKU#: 116751
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BIOGRAPHY:
Welsh artist who took up painting to win the affections of the girl who was to become his wife.
Gwilym Pritchard, who has died aged 84, was an artist whose dramatic and colourful landscapes celebrated the beauty of his native Wales.
He never set out to become a painter. He claimed that he only took an interest in art to win the affections of Claudia Williams, who after the war had moved from Surrey with her parents to his village on the north Wales coast. Claudia was studying painting at Chelsea School of Art.
Prichard's earliest paintings were of south-east Anglesey: Puffin Island, Penmon Priory and Red Wharf Bay. The landscape there is rich in history, the soil eroded by westerly gales exposing limestone outcrops amid the orange bracken . Like Palmer in Shoreham and Constable in Suffolk, Prichard was an artist
of regional expression who communicated a love of a particular locality. It might be the play of light on a hillside, a snow-encrusted farm in winter, a meandering sheep track or an approaching storm. As well as the upland and coastal landscapes of north Wales, he also painted in France, Italy, Greece and
Tunisia.
The son of the village headmaster, Gwilym Arifor Pritchard (he dropped the for his professional name in 1980) was born at Llanystumdwy near Criccieth on March 4 1931. Gwilym's early experiences growing up among the foothills of Snowdonia shaped his attitude towards nature and art.
After a period of National Service in Wiltshire, Prichard enrolled at Birmingham School of Art. He and Claudia made their first home above a newsagent's shop in Anglesey, then in a council house. With a growing family of four children and a full-time teaching post at Llangefni Grammar School, maintaining a
career as a professional artist required commitment and determination. After the children were tucked up in bed, they set to work in the front room. From the outset their domestic circumstances attracted press attention.
During subsequent decades Prichard participated in leading exhibitions throughout Wales, among them the National Eisteddfod and the National Museum of Wales. He exhibited at the New Art Centre in Belgravia and he staged six solo exhibitions at the Heal's Mansard Gallery in Tottenham Court Road. In
1972 he gave up teaching and became a full-time painter.
By 1984, however, the couple longed to escape the damp Snowdonian air. With nothing more than an invitation to look after a friend's dog on the Greek island of Skiathos, they sold their house near Caernarfon and, guided by a school atlas, drove across Europe in their none too reliable estate car loaded
with clothes and art materials. It would be 16 years before they would return to live in Wales.
After three months in Greece, they began their homeward journey through Italy, staying in Provence for a year and settling on Brittany's southern coast for four years. Here in a former boulangerie they set up home and studio and co-founded the Rochefort School of Creative Arts .
Prichard was at home in the Celtic regions of France. He painting the landscape, its farmsteads and the turbulent Atlantic waters. The pair exhibited to acclaim around Europe. The magazine Capital advised its readership of French businessmen to “invest in paintings by Monet, Warhol, Picasso and Gwilym
Prichard. In 1995 they were each awarded the Silver Medal by the Academy of Arts, Sciences and Letters in Paris. Later that year Prichard was represented by Martin Tinney Gallery, Wales's leading gallery of contemporary art.
In 2000 the couple returned to Wales to live in Tenby. The Moelwyn Mountains, Cader Idris and the landscape around Ffestiniog were once more within easy reach. Prichard lived for days on end in his VW camper van as he painted among the hills. Tenby's mild climate and clear light inspired him to paint a
coastline that was not all windswept and bleak but necessitated a softer palette of dusty pink, rich ochre and slate blue. He worked intuitively, his knife and brushes teasing out the contours of the land: sometimes it is used as thickly as butter, elsewhere in thinned washes then scraped and scored. The
Welsh painter Ceri Richards once observed how Prichard “painted the bones beneath the land.
In 2001 the National Library of Wales staged a retrospective in celebration of Prichard's 70th birthday. Two years later he was made an Honorary Fellow of Bangor University. In 2013 Harry Heuser and Robert Meyrick published Gwilym Prichard: A Lifetime's Gazing.
Wales remained dear to Prichard. Away from his homeland he missed “the sea and the ever-changing pattern of the tides; the ruggedness of the land, the limestone walls, the windswept stunted thorn trees; the quality of light that is reflected from the sea (when even on dull days gives a pear-like light)
and the sound of [his] own Celtic language.
Gwilym Prichard, born March 4 1931, died June 7 2015