Claudia Williams (b. 1933)
Claudia Jane Herington Williams was born in Purley, Surrey, the great-grand daughter of a Cardiganshire sheep-farmer. She is the only child of Frank Williams, a London-born civil-servant and Gladys Irene, she began her life of art at Chelsea School of Art.
Throughout her career she has exhibited widely, and her work features in many important public and private collections. She was elected to the Royal Cambrian Academy in 1979 and is an Honorary Fellow of Bangor University.
Claudia and her husband, the Welsh artist Gwilym Prichard, lived in France for 15 years, where her work was positively received leading to a 1995 award of Silver Medal by the Academy of Arts, Sciences and Letters in Paris, in recognition of her contribution to the arts in France.
At the beginning of the millennium, a hugely popular retrospective was held at the National Library of Wales and an exhibition of her powerful and moving Tryweryn paintings was shown there in 2010. The National Museum of Wales in Cardiff holds one of her paintings for the National Collection.
Gwilym Prichard and Claudia Williams shared their life together for sixty-two years until Gwilym died in 2015. They shared a life which was immersed in art, travel, Welsh landscape, family, and love. And while Gwilym was inspired by rugged landscapes, it is the theme of family and love that became Claudia’s enduring muse. The artist said that she never gets tired of people watching and that family life is her inspiration.
Her work is a visual diary of her life - it is biographical, and some of her later work was taken from sketches and drawings from many years before, when her children were very young, and when her young family did not give her the time to concentrate on a complete painting.
Claudia Williams' work captures those fleeting moments within a family dynamic, which should matter so much, but are often dismissed within the hustle and bustle of modern life.
Her work has a timeless quality about it as it embraces moments within relationships that are integral to humans. In her work there are moments which are so familiar to us that sometimes their values can be easily forgotten - the sharing of jokes with friends, sharing smiles with siblings, the breastfeeding bond of mother and child, bathing our children, kicking the leaves, and smelling the roses.
Below is but a selection of Claudia’s paintings that we have sold at The Welsh Sale in the last few years.
Should you have work by Claudia Williams or other Welsh paintings or prints for which you would like to receive an emailed valuation, please do contact us at:
Ben Rogers Jones ben.rogersjones@rogersjones.co.uk
