Pen and Palette: Charles Whitfield Richards and His Circle

A brief biography focuses on a man who made a name for himself as both an artist and journalist, particularly in the South.

In 1906, Charles Whitfield Richards was born in Rome, Mississippi, and grew up on his family’s 80-acre property, much of it a working farm. The death of his father, Mose, in 1917 was catastrophic for the family—Mose was only 45 years old and Richards was 10. Richards’ mother, Jake, sold the farm and moved with her son to Memphis, Tennessee. By 15, Richards began work as a reporter for the Memphis Press, the start of a long career as a journalist for newspapers, radio, and early television, eventually rising to considerable prominence. But Richards was a “nervous fellow,” one afflicted with a “wanderlust and a nervousness about staying in one location for long.” As a result, he traveled widely, at one point joining the circus, at another gaining employment as a seaman aboard a merchant ship, a shiftlessness diligently chronicled by Warner. A talented artist since he was a boy, Richards studied drawing and painting at the Académie Delécluse in France and would eventually become a notable painter, printmaker, and sculptor known for his “strong grasp of composition and color theory.” The author’s research is marvelously rigorous, and some of the book is based on extensive interviews he conducted with Richards before he died in 1992. Richards was a prodigiously gifted man, and intriguingly mercurial as well. He seemed temperamentally doomed to suffer an endlessly turbulent romantic history, one well documented—with meticulousness but without prurience—by Warner. This edifying biography brings not only Richards to life, but also the always-evolving artistic culture of the South, as vibrant as it was fraught.

An incisive and enlightening snapshot of a neglected artist and his time.