Frank Richards RBA (1863-1935) studied at the Birmingham School of Art and was subsequently elected a member of the Birmingham Society of Artists in 1884. He spent a time travelling in Europe and North Africa before settling in Newlyn by 1890. Here he would have encountered Stanhope Forbes, Harold Harvey, Henry Scott Tuke, Frank Bramley, as well as his fellow Birmingham artists Walter Langley and Edwin Harris. Many of the artists had spent time in northern France where they were converted to plein-air painting with its rejection of studio reworking and had been greatly influenced by artists such as Jules Bastien-Lepage.   The group took the Cornish fishing community and the coastal landscape as their subject, often viewed through an unsentimental lens, highlighting the hardship as well as the summertime idylls.

 

He exhibited regularly in Newlyn and St Ives and more widely both commercially and publicly in London and the provinces including the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the Royal Society of Artists in Birmingham, Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and Manchester City Art Gallery.  

His work can be found in several public collections including the beautiful example, In a Cornish Orchard in the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, Bournemouth which holds several of his paintings.