A Kind of Homecoming

In 2000, the landscape painter Gwilym Prichard returned to Wales after seventeen years of living abroad, first in Greece and then in France.  The news was hailed by the Welsh press as an artist’s ‘homecoming’ to ‘the land of his birth.’  In fact, Prichard and his wife, the figurative painter Claudia Williams (1933–2024), were relocating to Pembrokeshire, a part of Wales where the couple had not lived before.

The landscape paintings by Prichard in this auction date from the artist’s later years, when he and Williams had settled in Tenby after decades of moving from one home to another in Wales, England and Europe—‘home’ being, at times, no more than a campervan.  In many ways, these later canvases constitute a consolidation of half-a-century of painterly practice; and yet, in subject matter and mood, in their aesthetic as well as their approach to landscape painting, they are very much a departure from the work that Prichard had produced prior to 1984, when the couple’s European adventure began. 

This noticeable change is a testament to the profound influence that life in France had on the artist, even though, instead of separating him from his Welsh roots, made him more aware of them.  ‘The colours certainly struck me,’ Prichard remarked upon his time in Europe. Those years in Brittany and Provence also changed his ‘outlook on humanity, art and just living for the day.’

Prichard grew up in the Welsh-speaking community of Llanystumdwy, a small village on the Llŷn Peninsula in North Wales.  From the late 1950s onward, the Birmingham College of Art graduate became known for his moody paintings of the Anglesey coastline and the rugged, austere scenery of Cader Idris, the Moelwyn Mountains and Tan-y-Grisiau.

After being awarded the Saxton Barton Memorial Prize at the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Cambrian Academy in 1958 for his painting Anglesey Landscape, Prichard soon established himself in the art world, building a steady market for his work.  At the Bangor Arts Festival Exhibition of 1959 alone, he sold twenty-two works.  In Wales, interest in Prichard’s work never waned; indeed, it increased after his return from France, a fact to which a string of exhibitions— including a show at the National Library of Wales—and the publication of a monograph in 2013 attest.

The landscape paintings dating from the 1960s and 1970s are distinguished by a fascination both with the sublime and the mundane, something that is still observable in his Pembrokeshire paintings, which feature dramatic sunsets and humble, unassuming dwellings alike.  When choosing his subjects, Prichard avoided representing scenery as conventionalised by mass-marketed picture-postcards.  An anecdote Prichard liked recalling was that one day, while painting en plein air, he was confronted by a stranger who stopped her car to advise him that he was painting ‘the wrong view.’  To avoid such meddling, he generally worked in the studio, relying on the aide-mémoires of his sketchbooks.

‘I suppose I am a lonely person,’ Prichard reflected in 1974 when commenting on the fact that his landscapes were largely devoid of figures, except, occasionally, to indicate scale. Prichard’s earlier work, in the assessment of his friend, Kyffin Williams, showed ‘traces of struggle, physical and mental.’  According to Williams, Prichard ‘obviously fights the picture to try and achieve the end that is always in his mind.’  Ceri Richards observed that Prichard had the ability to paint ‘the bones beneath the land.’

Prichard’s later paintings, produced decades after his battle with alcoholism, are comparatively untroubled, despite his declining health.  They are less concerned with digging beneath the soil of his native land in search of its secrets—the question of identity—as they are with the beauty that is apparent and out in the open: the bright façades, the broad horizon, the yellow sands of Pembrokeshire’s beaches and the expanse of the sea beyond.

Tenby’s almost Mediterranean light, along with the memory of years lived in more southerly climes, induced Prichard to paint landscapes that are inviting rather than severe, spirited instead of savage.  ‘In Wales there are jewels / To gather, but with the eye / Only,’ R. S. Thomas declared in one of Prichard’s favourite poems, “The Open Window.” Prichard’s later work makes this discovery look effortless.

There is a freshness, directness and geniality about Prichard’s twenty-first century canvases, in which introspection is giving way to conviviality.  In this spirit, Prichard invites us to marvel at a spectacular sunset at Wybren Coch, Trefdraeth (2010) or gently leads us down to the sea, as in I Lawr am Trefdraeth (2010), guided by a shepherd who, ushering us into the landscape, serves as a stand-in for the artist.  

Prichard’s paintings have always shown human presence and the mark that agriculture and industry made on the land.  In latter days, however, Prichard decided to ‘leave [figures] in’ because, he admitted, ‘sometimes they amuse[d]’ him.  No doubt, the six decades that Prichard spent in the company of a figurative artist and portrait painter convinced him to reconsider his views on the relative ‘insignificance’ of humankind in the culturally transformed land we so often regard as the natural world.

In a 2008 issue of the Royal Cambrian Academy publication Celf125, Prichard aptly described his later work as ‘[c]olourful, happy and communicating,’ as being imbued with a ‘sense of belonging.’  The sought-after qualities that perhaps resonate most with us today are the hopefulness and hard-earned harmony these paintings bring home.

Dr Harry Heuser 

Writer and exhibition curator; with Prof Robert Meyrick, he co-authored the monograph Gwilym Prichard: A Lifetime’s Gazing (2013).

View all lots by Gwilym Prichard in April's Welsh Sale