Oliffe Richmond
Oliffe Richmond
Lizard Man (Variation) 2 1962 bronze 36×16×13cm
$12,000 or 4 payments of $3,000
Oliffe Richmond
Four sketches c1970 fibre tip pen 27×19cm
$800 or 4 payments of $200
Oliffe Richmond
Striated shape like a prancing horse (Crete) c1975 pencil 29×12cm
$800 or 4 payments of $200
Oliffe Richmond
Striated Shapes like a Running Figure 1970-1975 felt pen 25×20cm
$800 or 4 payments of $200
Oliffe Richmond
Studies for late wooden sculptures 3 1969-75 black & coloured felt pen 25×20cm
$800 or 4 payments of $200
Oliffe Richmond
Three sculptural studies 2 c1974 pen & ink 27×21cm
$800 or 4 payments of $200
OLIFFE RICHMOND
(1919-1977), sculptor, was born on 8 November 1919 at Old Beach, Hobart, fifth child of Robert Lawrence Richmond, a farmer from England, and his Tasmanian-born wife Catherine Augusta, née Gage. In 1929 the family moved to New Town. Oliffe attended (1929-36) The Friends’ School where he excelled at athletics, cricket, rowing and football, and won a prize for pencil sketching. A female friend recalled that, with his dark hair, olive skin and brown eyes, he was ‘much sought after’. After studying (1937-39) art and applied art at Hobart Technical College, and gaining a diploma in 1940, he worked for Amos Vimpany, Hobart’s most prominent stonemason, in whose workshop he learned much about materials, tools and methods of carving. He was also influenced by the ‘modernistic’ ideas of the New Zealand-born sculptor Alison Duff.
Richmond had learned to fly small aircraft while he was a student. On the outbreak of World War II he volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force, but was rejected because of a slight defect in his vision. Mobilized in the Militia on 19 August 1940, he rose to staff sergeant in the Intelligence Corps, Hobart, before serving (September to November 1944) in New Guinea with the Royal Australian Engineers. The environment excited his sensibilities with its exotic flora and fauna, and different human physiological ‘types’. He drew scenes of army life, but his was, fundamentally, a sculptor’s perception. Even in his fully resolved chalk or pencil portrait studies of soldiers, he was concerned with the head as a solid form rather than a face as a window to a soul. The native artefacts he collected would continue to influence his work.
Back in Australia, Richmond performed engineering staff duties until he was discharged from the army on 6 March 1946. That year he enrolled at the East Sydney Technical College to study sculpture under Lyndon Dadswell. In 1948 he won a New South Wales government travelling scholarship. He was formally attached to the Royal College of Art, London, but soon set off for the major art centres in Europe. Returning to England, Oliffe worked as Moore’s assistant in 1948-50,1954,1956 and 1958. In 1956 he succeeded Moore as a teacher in sculpture at Chelsea School of Art in London. Although he occasionally helped Moore to work on major pieces, he began to build his own career as a sculptor. At the register office, Chelsea, on 22 July 1952 he married Waehlin Fong.
From 1954 Richmond’s sculptures were included in major group exhibitions in London and other British cities, and in Paris, Oslo, Zurich, Switzerland, Sydney, Melbourne, and Phoenix, Arizona, United States of America. When his first solo showing was held, at the Molton Gallery, London, the critic Edward Lucie-Smith commented: ‘it is not very often that an artist springs on us more or less fully fledged’. Other solo exhibitions followed, in Belfast (1964), New York (1964), London (1965), Canberra and Melbourne (1967), and Sydney (1968). The highly textured figurative bronzes of his first exhibition—suggesting intense human energy and inner tension, and described by Dadswell as ‘heroic and monumental’—gave way towards the end of the decade to a series of aluminium assemblages made up of machined and extruded industrial components which embodied none of the organic character that had stamped his work to that point. In the new, hard-edged, planar pieces there was no evidence of the artist’s hand; instead, this new sculpture paid homage to the machine.
About 1970, at the time of his aluminium constructions, Richmond produced two quite different bodies of work. One comprised intimate little forms carved out of the toughest woods, such as ebony; the other consisted of a series of bronze abstract pieces, cast by means of the lost-wax process from forms manipulated from wax sheets. Despite their small size, these exquisite pieces possessed intimations of much larger scale. A sense of the monumental had long been a characteristic of Richmond’s work. It found dramatic expression in his final series, a collection of massive assemblages in wood, first exhibited at the Commonwealth Art Gallery, London, in early 1976. Dadswell was left with a lasting impression of ‘a room filled with towering forms’ and felt as if he were ‘a man amongst the monsters of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds’.
Richmond placed artistic integrity above popular and material success. Laconic and self-effacing, he was rock-solid in maintaining his aesthetic values. He meditated for long periods among the megaliths of Stonehenge and was sustained by the sense of being part of a great and ancient tradition. Survived by his wife, he died of myocardial infarction on 26 February 1977 in his home at Kensington and was cremated. His work is held by major galleries in Britain, the Netherlands and Australia.
Lindsay Broughton
Australian Dictionary of Biography
Select Bibliography
G. Sturgeon, The Development of Australian Sculpture 1788-1975 (Lond, 1978); K. Scarlett, Australian Sculptors (Melb, 1979); C. Hogben, Oliffe Richmond, exhibition catalogue (Syd, 1980); C. E. Johannes, Oliffe Richmond Drawings, exhibition catalogue (Hob, 1989); G. Legge, Oliffe Richmond 1919-77, exhibition catalogue (Syd, 1993); Art and Australia, 3, no 1, June 1965, 15, no 2, Dec 1977. More on the resources
Author: Lindsay Broughton
Print Publication Details: Lindsay Broughton, ‘Richmond, Robert Oliffe Gage (1919 – 1977)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 16, Melbourne University Press, 2002, pp 86-87.
Collections
Art Gallery of NSWÂ
Art Gallery of South AustraliaÂ
Art Gallery of Western AustraliaÂ
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Auckland Art GalleryÂ
Australian National Gallery, Canberra
Australian War Memorial, Canberra
Geelong Gallery, Victoria
Heide Museum of Modern Art , Victoria
Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne
Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
Museum of New Zealand, Wellington
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
National Portrait Gallery, CanberraÂ
Queensland Art Gallery GOMA, Brisbane
Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Launceston
Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery, Hobart
The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin
Alanvale TAFE Campus, Tasmania
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh
The Kröller-Müller Museum Netherlands
Tate Gallery London
St Pauls Catherdral London
Arts Council Collection, Hayward Gallery, UK
Sissinghurst Castle, Kent UK
PMSA, Sculpture, Dulwich High School, Red Post Hill UK
Oliffe Richmond
London studio 1961 (photo courtesy Camilla Jessel)
Oliffe Richmond
Portrait of Waehlin Fong (Mrs Richmond) c.1960 bronze 31×23×20cm
