Design for a Dropcloth at the Globe Theatre (for the Memorial Reading of Dylan Thomas's poems, organised by the Sunday Times, and given at the Globe Theatre on the evening of Sunday, 24 January 1954) : Homage to Dylan Thomas (1953-54) was one of many designs made when Richards was working on the sets and dropcloth for the Memorial Reading of Dylan Thomas's poems. He has explained that ‘the centre part of this particular design (as in some others) is a drawing mounted and surrounded by a border to meet the dimensions of the cloth - in this instance, the border was added some time later. Anyway, the design which was used for the cloth at the Reading is owned by John Russell. This is also a black drawing surrounded by a border - but it is a papier collé design in bright red and green.’
The motif of the owl and heron plucking at a shroud-bound corpse recurs again, in partly the same form, in the painting 'Do not go gentle into that good night' (1956) also at Tate. There is also a variant of the traditional memonto mori emblem of a broken-stalked spray of flowers in a vase. Two related designs were shown at the Whitechapel Art Gallery retrospective exhibition, 1960 (144 and 146); there is another in the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford, and a further two were acquired by the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea in 1954.
