Claudia Williams “always loved company”. Her compassion, curiosity and convivial nature come across in the exuberant, often large-scale figure compositions she created during a career spanning seven decades. An only child who would become a mother of four, Williams was a careful observer, not only of physical features but of gestures, movements and human interactions.
Claudia Jane Herington Williams was born in 1933 in Surrey to Frank Williams, a London-born civil servant, and Gladys Irene (née Herington), the daughter of a Leicestershire milliner and draper who established a successful department store bearing his name. Fabrics and patterns would feature in many of Williams’s paintings.
Because of financial difficulties, her parents relocated to the Llŷn Peninsula in north Wales shortly after the end of the Second World War. The child loved living on the Welsh coast, an enthusiasm for the seaside that is reflected in the many beach scenes she later painted.
Williams gained early recognition in 1949 when, at the age of 15, her ink-and-watercolour composition Milking won first prize in the National Exhibition of Children’s Art. Sponsored by the Sunday Pictorial, the competition was open to all schools in the UK and to some institutions abroad. Nearly 47,000 entries were received.
Milking was reproduced in magazines and newspapers, as well as in the book Picture and Pattern-Making by Children.
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On the strength of her prizewinning performance, Williams was accepted at Chelsea School of Art in London in 1950. She “often stayed for evening classes” to make sure that she “got in plenty of life drawing with a varied collection of tutors”, among them a “very intense” John Berger. In her second year, she was awarded the Christopher Head Scholarship for Drawing.
Despite her accomplishments, Williams abandoned her academic training after meeting her future husband, the landscape painter Gwilym Prichard. The “dark-haired Welshman had swept me off my feet. Rather scandalous in those days,” Williams reflected. The couple married in 1954 and worked alongside each other until Prichard’s death in 2015 at the age of 84. Their enduring partnership and peripatetic life became the subject of several radio and television documentaries. She is survived by their children: Ceri, Ben, Justin and Clare.
Williams produced many of her most ambitious works after the age of 50. In 1984, she painted Greenham, Peace Vigil, now in the National Library of Wales. She had visited Greenham Common in Newbury, Berkshire, on several occasions in support of the Women’s Peace Camp erected there in 1981 to demonstrate against the deployment of nuclear Tomahawk cruise missiles at the site. Williams’s painting is characteristically celebratory, with clear religious overtones. Williams had converted to Catholicism in 1956 and drew strength from her faith.
Their children grown up, Williams and Prichard decided to give up their home in north Wales and journeyed to Greece in a camper van. It was the start of a 17-year-long adventure in Europe. Williams maintained sketchbooks to capture her observations. In Venice, she was “struck by the interesting faces” of the locals. “Here were Bellinis, Botticellis, Leonardos and Piero della Francescas, all living and walking around!”
In 1985, Williams and Prichard rented an old farmhouse in Provence. A year later, they set up a studio in a small house near the harbour at Vannes in Brittany. The couple lived frugally but were encouraged by the interest in their work from French critics and the public alike. In 1992, they co-founded the Rochefort School of Creative Arts. Students travelled as far as 60 miles to attend classes in life-drawing, watercolour and sculpture. Three years later, Williams and Prichard were awarded the Silver Medal by the Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters in Paris.
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The couple moved back to Wales in 2000 and eventually settled in Tenby. That year, Williams’s homecoming was celebrated by the National Library of Wales with a major retrospective. Williams would return to the library in 2005 to conduct research for a series of paintings and drawings that would form a touring exhibition commemorating the last days of Tryweryn, a Welsh village that was flooded in 1965 to create a reservoir designed to supply water for Liverpool. “The community was really treated abominably,” Williams said. Empathising with the displaced, she drew on her own experience of loss.
Williams found people “interesting wherever they are”. As her friend, the artist Jonah Jones, remarked, Williams approached her subjects, many of which were children, not “from the outside, but from an intimate acquaintance” that is “implicit in her work”.
Claudia Williams was born on August 19, 1933. She died on June 17, 2024, aged 90