“Painting has led me to question the assumption that we simply look out at the world.... My research suggests that we both look out and look in, and the world is literally within the mind of our complex identity. My work sets out to plot some of the geometries of a new sense of embodiment. Inevitably these representations will hardly seem recognisable or typical to eyes conditioned by the renaissance view of incarnation which photography has made ubiquitous. But they may help illuminate some who feel old ways of seeing are outworn.” - Miles Richmond

Born in Middlesex and trained at Kingston School of Art during World War Two, in 1946 Richmond took classes at the Borough Polytechnic in south London under one of the greatest (but at that time also one of the most under-rated) twentieth-century British artists, David Bomberg (1890–1957). Immediately prior to the First World War, Bomberg had been one of the most dynamic and original among the rich crop of students who emerged from the Slade School of Art. As a teacher at the Borough Polytechnic he passed on his powerful vision of art to a new generation of artists. They included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Dennis Creffield. Auerbach called Bomberg ‘probably the most original, stubborn, radical intelligence that was to be found in art schools’ at that time.

With Creffield, Cliff Holden, Dorothy Mead and a number of others, Richmond became a member of the Borough Group, an affiliation of artists closely linked to Bomberg’s teaching. Of all Bomberg’s pupils, Richmond would be the most devoted, following him to Ronda, Spain, in 1952, where he would remain with his wife and children for much of the next twenty years. Richmond’s oil paintings of figures, flowers, landscapes and buildings – rich in light, strong in colour and form – like his intense, brooding charcoal drawings, owed a clear debt to his teacher.

Returning to London in the early 1970s Richmond painted ‘The Red Room.’ It marked a break from his artistic debt to his teacher, launching him in his own powerful direction as an artist. He soon moved to North Yorkshire, where the English landscape – seen with the visionary eyes of a William Blake or a Samuel Palmer – became his subject. ‘I want to look at nature as nature is,’ he would later write, ‘and find out what we have in common. I find we share a field of forces, a vast electro-magnetic field of forces: a quantum chaos of unimaginable power.’

In 1992 Richmond would be invited to paint an enormous panoramic mural to mark the centenary of the Borough Polytechnic (now South Bank University). Working from the roof of the building, the view of London across the Thames became a major subject. The rapidly expanding city felt vibrant and alive under his confident, commanding gaze. On its unveiling the art critic Richard Cork would call it ‘a millennial tour de force.’ In 1994 Richmond moved to Middlesborough with his second wife, and he died there in 2008.

Richmond’s later works – particularly his watercolours – are some of the most important and powerful by a British artist of the later twentieth century. He was never quite a ‘School of London’ painter; he spent too long abroad, or too far north, for that. But he is one who has the potential to sit alongside Auerbach and Kossoff as a modern British artist of considerable significance.

David Boyd Haycock, November 2022