The year that Coconut Shy was painted, Wyndham Lewis came across a Richards painting in a mixed show - ‘it was like a live fish in the midst of a collection of dead ones. Or it was like a hundred little fish of brilliant hue, in violent movement… Richards’ figures are like quicksilver.’

More than any other British artist of his time, Richards was able to contain within one exuberant talent the diverse and contradictory dominant tendencies in contemporary modernist art – Cubism, abstraction and Surrealism – and to emphasise aspects of each and any of them according to the immediate imaginative imperative. Ceri Richards’ surrealism captured the magic and strange beauty in the unexpected and the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional, of which Coconut Shy is an outstanding example. A prize-winner of the Venice Biennale, Richards’ work is now held in public collections worldwide, including a collection of over 90 works at Tate Britain.

‘Sensuous exuberance is the defining mood of Richards’ spectacular painted characterisations of the subject … erotic desire, intimated in the heart shapes and in an abundance of other signs, is the sub-textual constant. Looked at in another way, these extravagant flaming creatures are grotesque, even nightmarish; they are emanations of the ominous mood of a world approaching an inevitable war with an unpredictable outcome. The sinister male costers of the Coconut Shy paintings of the 1940s are engrossed in violent action; they are rapt and self-contained, as if throwing grenades at an unseen enemy.’ - Mel Gooding