Gwilym Prichard

Gwilym Prichard met Claudia Williams as a teenager. ‘Love and art hit me at about the same time,’ he recalled of the moment near his Llanystumdwy home when ‘this beautiful young girl on a grey horse’ came riding ‘down the road to the junction where [he] was daydreaming.’  She stopped, looked down at him, and he looked up at her. ‘I fell instantly in love with Claudia. She then smacked the horse’s bottom and galloped away.’

Had it not been for that chance meeting, it is likely that Prichard’s journey through life and in art would have taken a very different course.

Prichard never set out to become a painter. He insisted that he only took an interest in art to win the attention and affections of Williams who was studying at Chelsea School of Art. He enrolled on a two-year art teacher training course at Normal College, Bangor followed by a diploma course at Birmingham College of Art. ‘We were both dreamers,’ Prichard wrote, ‘and at times our dreams have resulted in realities.’ The couple married in 1954.

Raising a family of four, teaching full time at Llangefni Grammar School, and maintaining a career as a professional artist required determination. Prichard regularly participated in major exhibitions throughout Wales and by the 1960s was showing at the New Art Centre in Belgravia and at Heal’s flagship Mansard Gallery on Tottenham Court Road, where he staged six solo exhibitions.

Growing up among the foothills of Snowdonia shaped Prichard’s attitudes toward nature and art. ‘Gwilym is a dyed-in-the-wool Eifionydd man whose childhood was spent within view of the Celtic Sea and the mountains of Eryri,’ artist Jonah Jones noted. There is ‘an unmistakable quality’ about his works; ‘rich paint, spontaneous brushwork, fearless colour combinations and, above all, that deep sense of Celtic colour and form.’ Anglesey, within the triangle formed by Pentraeth, Penmon and Beaumaris, became for Prichard a favourite haunt – a land rich in history, its soil eroded by westerly gales exposing limestone outcrops amid orange bracken. But when the east winds blew, Pritchard observed, ‘it killed the colour, and brought with it cold, dull and dark skies. This is the only time that I retire into the studio, where Claudia paints our three boys and I my dried flowers.’

Prichard would have been content settling in one place. ‘As an emotional Celt I tend to paint from the heart,’ he wrote in 1974, ‘My concern is to convey my emotions and enthusiasm for Wales through richness of texture, paint and colour.’ Instead, he willingly indulged his wife’s nomadic streak.

 ‘I’ve got itchy feet,’ Williams declared, ‘It’s stimulating to have fresh friends and fresh surroundings.’ As a consequence, the couple bought, renovated and made their home in some twenty-five properties, and Prichard painted throughout north Wales, in England (Leicester and near Hereford), as well as Greece, Italy and France, along the way visiting Portugal and Tunisia.

In 1984, following an invitation to dog-sit on the Greek island of Skiathos, they sold their house near Caernarfon and, guided by a school atlas, drove across Europe in a car loaded with art materials. It would be sixteen years before they returned to live in Wales. After three months in Greece, they began a year-long journey through Italy, stayed in Provence for a year then settled in Vannes on Brittany’s southern coast for four years. Visiting the mediaeval hill town of Rochefort-en-Terre, forty kilometres inland, they ‘completely lost [their] hearts to the place,’ Prichard recalled. Here, in a former boulangerie, they set up home and studio.

Prichard was immediately at home in the Celtic regions of France. He travelled around Brittany painting the countryside, its farmsteads and the turbulent Atlantic waters that batter the Finistère coastline. 

The move to France opened new markets for their work as they exhibited to acclaim around Europe. However, the long drives and overnight channel crossings to the UK were taking their toll; Williams was also missing their grandchildren growing up. The couple’s move to Tenby in 2000 marked a permanent return to Wales.

Living in Pembrokeshire, Prichard was within relatively easy reach Snowdonia. He painted in the hills for days at a time, hunkering down at night in his Volkswagen Transporter. Prichard’s paintings of Cader Idris, Tan-y-Grisiau, the Moelwyn Mountains and landscape around Ffestiniog, present a stark and weather-beaten terrain – the paint richly and expressively applied. They capture the atmosphere of the brooding landscape of Snowdonia.

In contrast, the geography of Pembrokeshire, its mild climate and clear light, called for a gentler treatment and a palette of dusty pink, rich ochre and slate blue, and a quality of light reminiscent of St Ives, or Pont Aven in Brittany. Prichard often painted Tenby bathed in the sunlight of a summer’s afternoon, the surrounding coastline hazy in its warmth, and the sun creating shimmering effects over the sea. In lieu of a mountainous backdrop, Prichard created man-made mountains of Tenby’s steep-sided Georgian townscape.

‘Painting is very often great fun,’ Prichard enthused in a 1988 BBC documentary. ‘There’s a certain amount of love that comes through.’ Prichard’s art is also a celebration of his materials. He worked intuitively, spontaneously applying paint as brushes and knives tease out the sensuous contours of the land. Sometimes the paint is thick and buttery, elsewhere it is used sparingly in thinned washes, then scraped and scored. As Ceri Richards once observed, Prichard ‘painted the bones beneath the land.’ 

Wherever life’s journey took Prichard, Wales remained dear to him. Away from his homeland, Prichard would miss ‘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.’

It is Wales that now misses an artist so consummate at sharing, with passion and integrity, his immense knowledge and experience of our land. This studio sale, comprising artworks spanning seven decades, offers a unique opportunity to partake of Prichard’s journey and his lifelong pursuit of love and art.

Prof Robert Meyrick

Friend of Gwilym Prichard and Claudia Williams and co-author with Harry Heuser of Gwilym Prichard: A Lifetime’s Gazing (Sansom, April 2013) and Claudia Williams: An Intimate Acquaintance (Sansom, October 2013).

View Journey: The Family Collection of Gwilym Prichard & Claudia Williams here.