‘… talent is not enough’

‘I had led a very sheltered life, really, but at least I had a goal,’ Claudia Williams reflected toward the end of her career on her decision to terminate her art school training in London at the age of twenty in order to marry and raise a family in Wales. ‘I loved being a new mother,’ she declared emphatically, ‘even though I had had no experience of small children.’

And yet, as conventional as a retreat into domesticity might strike us, Williams’ stated ‘goal’ all along had been the pursuit of ‘a life in art.’  Far from marking the end of that pursuit, the abrupt departure from the artworld—away from the galleries she had haunted during her days of study at Chelsea School of Art—would define Williams as a painter whose figure compositions are rooted in an attentiveness to gestures, moods and social interactions of close-knit family groupings.  As an only child to middle-aged parents, Williams had longed for the companionship that became a leitmotif in her art.

Another thread that runs through her practice is an enthusiasm for textiles, as exemplified by paintings such as Mother and Child, Twins, and Dulcimer Player.

‘I loved adding patterns,’ Williams remarked; but there is nothing extraneous in such additions, by way of which her works add up to compositions about which, as art historian Moira Vincentelli pointed out, nothing is ‘casual or snapshot-like.’  Fleeting moments are prolonged by a mindfulness to meaningful detail.

Even decades later, Williams was able to identify specific articles of clothing, drapery and upholstery depicted in her artwork.  It is an admiration for the decorative that is also apparent in her ornamental needlework and collages, an essential aspect of her creative practice that has remained largely overlooked and underappreciated.

Williams called it a ‘revelation’ when, learning to weave in primary school, she noticed the ‘effect of one colour against another or interwoven together.’  She later attributed her fascination with fabrics to the fact that her grandfather, Frederick Herington, had been a milliner and draper who established a department store bearing his name. 

Beginning in the 1960s, Williams built a reputation as a portrait artist and secured a number of significant commissions.  At times, she worked on spec after being drawn in by a prospective subject.  One such work is Williams’ portrait of stage and screen actor Bruce Myers, whom Williams and her artist-husband Gwilym Prichard had encountered during a walk in Provence.  

Myers, who, like Williams and Prichard, had lived in North Wales, presented the couple with tickets for Peter Brook’s acclaimed production of The Mahabharata, in which Myers appeared in the role of Karna.

Self-portraits and likenesses of her children aside - the couple’s youngest son being the subject of Justin in Plas Tan y Bwlch - drawings and paintings of Williams’ husband are most prominent for although she enjoyed nothing more than observing small children at rest or play, Williams occasionally appreciated a ‘sitter who did not wriggle’ or needed ‘changing.’

Imbued with a great deal of personal history, much of which is preserved in diaries, travel journals and sketchbooks, the works by Williams in this auction span eight decades of a remarkably consistent if considerably varied ‘life in art.’  They range from Williams’ quintessential figure compositions of women and children in interior or outdoor settings, including vibrant and animated beach scenes such as Surfers and A Good Book, to sketches of anthropomorphic rocks that evince her acknowledged debt to the sculptor Bernard Meadows.

An assistant to Henry Moore, Meadows had been Williams’ exacting life-drawing tutor at Chelsea.   As recorded in a diary entry dated 20 Oct. 1950, Meadows criticised his student for putting ‘an outline round the figure’ that ‘looked like a piece of bent wire.’  While the criticism somewhat ‘depressed’ Williams at the time, Meadow’s instructions helped her to draw figures that looked ‘more solid.’

The earliest example of Williams’ artistic practice (in lot 139 at the end of the auction) dates from the time when, aged sixteen, she was awarded first prize—among some 47,000 entries—in the National Exhibition of Children’s Art.  Serving as judges were John Rothenstein, then Director of the Tate Gallery, Herbert Read, President of the Society for Education through Art, and Philip James, Director of the Arts Council of Great Britain.  An auspicious start, indeed.  When Williams learned that she and a close friend had been shortlisted, elation was tempered with exasperation.  The ‘worst of it’ was that ‘they wanted 10 more of our paintings,’ she noted in her teenage diary before steadfastly setting to work.

Produced nearly seventy year later, Studio, Still Life - with the tools of her trade conspicuously on display - is a testament to Williams’ perseverance even after the death of her husband in 2015. 

Her palette had lost none of the vibrancy that dates back to the mid-1980s, when, already in their 50s, Williams and Prichard left Wales—where both had exhibited frequently at the National Eisteddfod, and, rather than working in isolation, had a circle of friends and acquaintances that included Kyffin Williams and Charles Tunnicliffe—to embark on a journey to Greece, Italy and France, an absence from Britain that, quite to their own surprise, would last until the end of the century, after which the couple returned to Wales and, eventually, settled in Tenby. The seaside town provided ample material for paintings such as Ladies' Game at the Bowling Green.

Williams also took her return to Wales as an opportunity to engage with the nation’s history by creating a series of narrative paintings commemorating the flooding of a community at Tryweryn, whose struggle and loss she relates, as in The Day Is Drawing Near, from the perspective of the women affected.

As her subject matter and her approach to it demonstrate throughout, family and faith (Williams converted to Roman Catholicism in 1956) anchored a peripatetic life, not without struggle, loss and financial uncertainty, in which she and Prichard moved house some two dozen times.

‘Having talent is not enough,’ Williams insisted.  To build and sustain a career requires ‘hard work’ and ‘tenacity.’  The enduring—and endearing—qualities resulting from that lifelong commitment are well represented in this auction, as are Williams’ ability to delight in the mundane, to capture the human interactions that never ceased to captivate her, and to take us along on a journey that, however far it took her, always feels like a homecoming.

Dr Harry Heuser 

Co-author, with Robert Meyrick, of Claudia Williams: An Intimate Acquaintance (Sansom, 2013).

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