Frances Richards attended Burslem School of Art from 1919 to 1924. Whilst a student she worked as a pottery designer at the Paragon China company. She won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London, where she studied from 1924 to 1927. Here, she specialised in tempera and fresco painting, studying the writings of the early Italian renaissance painter Cennino Cennini. After graduating Richards married Welsh artist Ceri Richards and worked as a teacher at Camberwell School of Art and at Chelsea School of Art.
Richard's work appears to have been little influenced by her husband's painting. Mel Gooding writes: "...for over fifty years her own quiet and formalised… art was unaffected by her daily closeness to the extravagant and sometimes violent drama of [Ceri] Richards's painting." Instead, her work, soft and gentle, utilises colour harmonies and formal simplicity to create delicate and un-ostentatious compositions.
