Ravilious & Co.
I've been thinking about Eric Ravilious for a long time now - ever since we lived in Lewes, and could see the chalk paths across the Downs that he loved to draw. The exceptional exhibition, 'Ravilious & Co', which has just left Sheffield and will be reassembled at Compton Verney on March 17th 2018, is a reminder of the beauty and seriousness of his paintings. It is a testament to the research and persistence of Andy Friend and James Russell. And it demonstrates the astonishing vitality of Ravilious's artistic circle - the women and men who trained and worked alongside him. It seems a good time to try to pin down the reasons why I find his pictures so engrossing and a continual source of visual pleasure.
Sussex, Summer 1939:
I've been thinking about Eric Ravilious for a long time now - ever since we lived in Lewes, and could see the chalk paths across the Downs that he loved to draw. The exceptional exhibition, 'Ravilious & Co', which has just left Sheffield and will be reassembled at Compton Verney on March 17th 2018, is a reminder of the beauty and seriousness of his paintings. It is a testament to the research and persistence of Andy Friend and James Russell. And it demonstrates the astonishing vitality of Ravilious's artistic circle - the women and men who trained and worked alongside him. It seems a good time to try to pin down the reasons why I find his pictures so engrossing and a continual source of visual pleasure.
Sussex, Summer 1939:
A tea-table stands in the corner of the
garden. The milk-jug and plate of butter
are shaded by a battered umbrella. The
warm air smells of fresh bread and new hay.
Peggy Angus is expecting visitors.
She leans on the wall, her cotton dress flapping against her bare brown
legs, humming snatches of old tunes. At
the end of the track she sees them, dark figures against a chalk-white ground,
a man and a woman carrying knapsacks and painting gear. Eric Ravilious and his love Helen Binyon walk
up the long lane from Glynde Station.
Refugees from the clatter of London, for a few days they can shelter
beneath the open skies and lark-song.
Peggy’s cottage, Furlongs, sits beneath the swelling Sussex
Downs. It is a place of retreat for her
artist-friends, a survivor from quieter times.
While Britain prepares for war, a procession of shire-horses and wagons
pass her gate, and her front door stands open to the breeze and sunshine. Her fellow-students from the old days at the
Royal College of Art make their pilgrimages here. In her small sitting room, beneath a
ruby-glass oil lamp, the artists gather: Eric and Helen, Edward and Charlotte
Bawden, John and Myfanwy Piper. They share
a desire to catalogue the small wonders of the English landscape. Knowing that their world is under threat, the
need to paint becomes more urgent. They
are the inheritors of the visionary Romantic tradition, heirs to Samuel
Palmer. Yet their art is sharp and never
sentimental. It is underpinned by a
radicalism drawn from the utopias of William Morris.
And then the war breaks in.
Ravilious, Piper and Bawden join Kenneth Clark’s band of official war
artists. Bawden is posted to North
Africa and turns his hand to painting the vast theatres of war in Libya, Iraq
and Ethiopia. Piper sits with his
sketchbook in the smouldering relics of Coventry Cathedral. And Ravilious is offered a commission in the
Admiralty. He records coastal defences,
submarines and docks around the South Coast and in Norway. Then in the summer
of 1942 he is sent to Iceland. On 2nd
September his plane disappears over the sea, and he is lost.
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By tracing the patterns of friendship between Ravilious,
Bawden and their circle, the exhibition offers an alternative history of
English art. Furlongs was barely five
miles from Charleston, Virginia Woolf’s Sussex home. Like Charleston, Furlongs provided the
backdrop to love-affairs and intrigues.
But the artistic atmosphere of the two meeting-places could hardly have
been more different. The Bloomsbury
group were self-consciously modernist.
The folk at Furlongs, on the other hand, embraced the traditions of English
watercolour painting and wood-engraving.
Their work was intimate and evocative.
Ravilious traced the curl of a Swiss-roll with as much care
as he mapped the course of a river. He
and his friends loved trips to the seaside, DIY and bunting, Bonfire Night and
evenings in the pub. Benjamin Britten
and Henry Moore crossed their path, but this group of artists chose not to
follow their lead. Instead they painted
ordinary beauty, glimpsed from a train window.
Their visions of Englishness have become more poignant as the years have
passed. We now celebrate their legacy
in exhibitions, calendars, notecards and fridge magnets.
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Our first sight of Eric Ravilious is likely to be low key and domestic.
He slips quietly into our lives, with his black-and-white designs for the
breakfast table. We follow the undulating dot-and-dash around the rim of a
bowl. Then we start to feel our way into
one of his landscapes, pushing through a wire fence, up a path, over the
Downs. Next, we become entangled in a
coil of rope washed up in a watercolour.
Before we have quite realised what is happening, we are smitten. Ravilious has cast his spell.
Ravilious’s ability to enchant was recognised by his early friends and critics. Fellow-students at the Royal College of Art called him ‘the Boy’. In 1939, his pictures were described as ‘something magic, almost mystic, distilled out of the ordinary’.[i] The taut geometry of his paintings lifts mundane objects, insisting that we take them seriously. A battered bicycle, a loaf of bread, a pot of geraniums, each thing becomes delightful under his touch. And then disconcerting as we acknowledge its peculiarities. He makes us see the curves and edges, the relationship to other things placed beside it. As we look more closely, we notice that Ravilious’s watercolours never try to conceal the skeleton of his drawing beneath the bright washes of blue and yellow and orangey-red.
Ravilious’s ability to enchant was recognised by his early friends and critics. Fellow-students at the Royal College of Art called him ‘the Boy’. In 1939, his pictures were described as ‘something magic, almost mystic, distilled out of the ordinary’.[i] The taut geometry of his paintings lifts mundane objects, insisting that we take them seriously. A battered bicycle, a loaf of bread, a pot of geraniums, each thing becomes delightful under his touch. And then disconcerting as we acknowledge its peculiarities. He makes us see the curves and edges, the relationship to other things placed beside it. As we look more closely, we notice that Ravilious’s watercolours never try to conceal the skeleton of his drawing beneath the bright washes of blue and yellow and orangey-red.
With a ruler and a pencil he draws a web of lines. They
might become ceiling joists or floorboards, a quayside, a runway or young crops
in a field. But they are never exactly aligned with our idea of
perspective. His rooms are slightly
aslant, his table-tops are tilted. He keeps us on our toes, a little anxious
that the image could slide away from us or trip us up.
This is one of his magic tricks. Ravilious offers us pictures that at first
sight seem straightforward; as he said when he drew the folds of the Sussex
Downs, ‘the design was so beautifully obvious’.[ii] He holds our attention by making the familiar
look fresh. He watches from new vantage
points. He makes us question the choreography of his compositions. How could he
paint that bedroom, unless he was standing on a chair in one corner? Why did he outline those scissors and spoons
on a tray, laid out like a game of Pelmanism?
This tendency becomes more marked from 1940 when he begins
his War work. Ravilious’s paintings and
lithographs lead us into empty huts, then down into tunnels hung with maps and
out onto icy seas. His eye dwells on the
uneasy interludes that punctuate conflict.
He shows the steady administrative tasks – telephone calls, filing
cabinets, test flights – underpinning the drama of war. Occasionally he treats us to a burst of
artillery, blazing from a 9.2 gun positioned high above the coast.[iii] But even here he suggests that the soldiers
are simply getting on with their job.
There is no hurry. We do not know
what they are firing at, or whether they hit it. The yellow flash from the gun’s mouth is
hardly a sign of modern warfare. Instead
it seems like a nod to an earlier tradition of fireworks (which Ravilious
loved) or William Blake’s flaming flowers in Songs of Innocence and
Experience.
In 1941, the same year that Ravilious painted his bright
gun, an appreciation of Blake was published by David Cecil in The English
Poets. According to Cecil, Blake’s
poems were like ‘a rush of the wind in the tree-tops’ or ‘a fresh gale, racy
with the smell of earth’.[iv]
Ravilious responded in kind. His
gun-emplacement is set on a breezy upland. Wind-tossed flowers draw our eye
away from the figures, and across waving grasses towards the sea. What are the artillery-men defending? This was the central question for the artists
gathered by Kenneth Clark late in 1939 to document the war. It was not simply
the ‘green and pleasant land’ that produced Blake. It was the right for a man
to sit in a field with his sketchbook, despite the gunfire, in the ‘rush of the
wind’. England now meant both Blake and
gun-batteries. They co-existed in Ravilious’s watercolour, the pastoral
interrupted by a blast.
Clark oversaw a thoughtful and energetic project, encouraging modern painters to respond to the new face of combat. This was no exercise in nostalgia. And Clark did not keep his artists out of harm’s way. In Ravilious’s case, with his work for the Admiralty, his subject was the fragile edges of Britain. He painted a coastline defined by new concrete defences and curls of barbed wire, with the pleasure boats drawn up high onto the beach to sit out the war. There is the recurring motif of the lighthouse marking the intersections between land, sea and sky. Ravilious was particularly fond of the stumpy towers at Newhaven, as well as the elegant tension between curved and flat in the lighthouse at Rye. Sometimes in his paintings they shine into the darkness. More often, though, they are unlit, upright and waiting. Very occasionally, as in Belle Tout interior (1939), Ravilious shows us the view from inside the lantern, the sunlight streaming in through the window panes, almost too bright to look at. A calligraphic line dancing across the paper marks the boundary between land and sea.
Clark oversaw a thoughtful and energetic project, encouraging modern painters to respond to the new face of combat. This was no exercise in nostalgia. And Clark did not keep his artists out of harm’s way. In Ravilious’s case, with his work for the Admiralty, his subject was the fragile edges of Britain. He painted a coastline defined by new concrete defences and curls of barbed wire, with the pleasure boats drawn up high onto the beach to sit out the war. There is the recurring motif of the lighthouse marking the intersections between land, sea and sky. Ravilious was particularly fond of the stumpy towers at Newhaven, as well as the elegant tension between curved and flat in the lighthouse at Rye. Sometimes in his paintings they shine into the darkness. More often, though, they are unlit, upright and waiting. Very occasionally, as in Belle Tout interior (1939), Ravilious shows us the view from inside the lantern, the sunlight streaming in through the window panes, almost too bright to look at. A calligraphic line dancing across the paper marks the boundary between land and sea.
Ravilious delighted in rippling borderlines. We find them at the scalloped edges of
sandbanks as they dip beneath the waters of Rye Harbour (1938).
They mark the gap between grass and tarmac in
Runway Perspective (1942).
And
most spectacularly, Ravilious created a sparkling thread of water flowing
through marshland in Cuckmere Haven (1939). Here the meander of the river is echoed in
the ribbon of a chalk path through the grass, and even in the cloud formations.
Earth, water, sky are linked and defined by the looping lines of Ravilious’s
pencil.
However, he is careful not to let us become lost in a watery
maze. A stone wall and a field in the
foreground create a gently sloping springboard. From here the acrobatic
elements in the composition can rise, soar, twist and come to rest again. In every watercolour there is an
underpinning, an architecture which is laid down first. It is rarely quite on the square, and this
contributes to the tension between solid and line. But nevertheless, Ravilious mapped the
geology of his landscapes and the girders of his underground corridors in
pencil, before he explored their more delicate edges and crossing points.
This exhibition allows us to follow the threads back to his
early years as an art student, and forward towards his work in Norway and
Iceland. It reveals the strands that link him to the avant-garde of the 1920s
and his place in a wider circle of artists who wrote and thought and travelled
in interwar Britain. It also asks us to
consider how the loss of his aircraft in 1942, missing (presumed dead) before
his 40th birthday, altered the reception of his art. Above all, these displays allow us to linger, to delight in the complex surfaces of the watercolours, and the enjoy the intricacies of his black and white designs.
[ii]
Eric Ravilious, letter to Peggy Angus, 15 May 1939, in James Russell, Ravilious,
exhibition catalogue, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Philip Wilson Publishers, 2015,
p.10
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