page_title: Albert Richards (artist)
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Albert Richards (artist) / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: A Searchlight Battery image: a searchlight on a small paved area of a promenade, next to a lighthouse. The area is surrounded by barbed wire and also contains a small, manned anti-aircraft gun emplacement. There are several men in uniform in the battery, including one asleep on the ground near his tripod. Outside the fenced civilians relax on benches.
context_page_description: Albert Richards was a British war artist. Born in 1919 to a World War I veteran, he enlisted as a sapper in 1940. He later served in the British Army during World War II, both as a paratrooper and as a war artist. He was the youngest of the three British official war artists killed during the conflict.
context_section_description: Richards was born in Liverpool, the son of Hannah Beatty and George Richards, a World War I veteran and wood machinist. After attending the Wallasey School of Art and Crafts, Albert Richards studied at the Royal College of Art for three months before being conscripted into the Army in 1940. He enlisted as a sapper in 286 Field Company, Royal Engineers and was promoted to the rank of Lance Corporal. He served as a sapper from April 1940 until the middle of 1943.
  During that period he was assigned to duties such as building barrack huts and defence works throughout England and he frequently painted scenes showing these tasks. He submitted several of these paintings to the War Artists' Advisory Committee, which, impressed with their freshness and quality, began in May 1941, to purchase his artwork.
caption: A Searchlight Battery. (Art. IWM ARTLD 3284)
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