Welsh painter, printmaker and stage designer. He studied at Swansea School of Art from 1921 to 1924 and at the Royal College of Art from 1924 to 1927. During this period in London he also attended evening classes in life drawing at Westminster School of Art under Bernard Meninsky.
From 1940 to 1944 Richards ran the painting department at Cardiff School of Art; he was also commissioned by the Ministry of Information to make drawings of South Wales tin-plate workers. A commission to illustrate the poem The force that through the green fuse (1933) by Dylan Thomas for Poetry London (1947) led to paintings related to Thomas's writings and to the work of other poets such as Vernon Watkins.
The Cycle of Nature paintings (from 1944), with their powerful rhythms and metamorphic sexualised forms, perhaps characterise best what Richards himself saw as a Celtic element in his work, with a 'basis in proliferation and metaphor'.