Eric Ravilious

thumb|Two Women in a Garden (Ravilious). [[Tirzah Garwood on right]]

thumb|Tea at Furlongs, watercolour 1939

Eric William Ravilious (22 July 1903 – 2 September 1942) was a British painter, designer, book illustrator and wood-engraver. He grew up in Sussex, and is particularly known for his watercolours of the South Downs, Castle Hedingham and other English landscapes, which examine English landscape and vernacular art with an off-kilter, modernist sensibility and clarity. He served as a war artist, and was the first British war artist to die on active service in World War II when the aircraft he was in was lost off Iceland.

Early life and education

thumb|upright|May, woodcut of the [[Long Man of Wilmington by Eric Ravilious, 1925.]]

Eric William Ravilious was born on 22 July 1903 in Churchfield Road, Acton, west London, the son of Emma (née Ford) and Frank Ravilious. When he was young the family moved to Eastbourne in Sussex, where his parents ran an antiques shop.

Ravilious was educated at Eastbourne Municipal Secondary School for Boys, from September 1914 to December 1919. In 1919 he won a scholarship to Eastbourne School of Art and in 1922 another to study at the Design School at the Royal College of Art. There, he became a close friend of Edward Bawden and, from 1924, studied under Paul Nash.

In 1925 Ravilious received a travelling scholarship to Italy and visited Florence, Siena, and the hill towns of Tuscany.

Career and marriage

Following this he began teaching part-time at the Eastbourne School of Art, and from 1930 taught (also part-time) at the Royal College of Art. In the same year he married Eileen Lucy "Tirzah" Garwood, also an artist and engraver, whom he met whilst her tutor at Eastbourne College of Art. They had three children: John Ravilious (1935–2014); the photographer James Ravilious (1939–1999); and Anne Ullmann, née Ravilious (b. 1941), editor of books on her parents and their work.

In 1928 Ravilious, Bawden and Charles Mahoney painted a series of murals at Morley College in south London on which they worked for a whole year. In November 1933, Ravilious held his first solo exhibition at the Zwemmer Gallery in London, titled "An Exhibition of Water-Colour Drawings". Twenty of the 37 works displayed were sold.

Printmaking and illustration

thumb|left|Caravans, watercolour, 1936

Ravilious engraved more than 400 illustrations and drew over forty lithographic designs for books and publications during his lifetime. His first commission, in 1926, was to illustrate a novel for Jonathan Cape. He went on to produce work both for large companies such as the Lanston Monotype Corporation and smaller, less commercial publishers, such as the Golden Cockerel Press His style of wood-engraving was greatly influenced by that of Thomas Bewick, whom both he and Bawden admired. Following a trip in a submarine in the war he produced a series of lithographs on Submarines, a set of 12, one of which was entitled Submarine Dream.

Design

thumb|upright|Alphabet mug by Eric Ravilious, [[transfer printing on Wedgwood creamware, 1937]]

In February 1936, Ravilious held his second exhibition at the Zwemmer Gallery and again it was a success, with 28 out of the 36 paintings shown being sold.

Other popular Ravilious designs included the Alphabet mug of 1937, and the china sets, Afternoon Tea (1938), Travel (1938), and Garden Implements (1939), plus the Boat Race Day cup in 1938. Production of Ravilious' designs continued into the 1950s, with the coronation mug design being posthumously reworked for the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953.

He also undertook glass designs for Stuart Crystal in 1934, graphic advertisements for London Transport and furniture work for Dunbar Hay in 1936. He was especially inspired by the landscape of the South Downs around Beddingham in East Sussex. He frequently returned to Furlongs, the cottage of Peggy Angus. He said that his time there "altered my whole outlook and way of painting, I think because the colour of the landscape was so lovely and the design so beautifully obvious ... that I simply had to abandon my tinted drawings". Some of his works, such as Tea at Furlongs, were painted there.

Murals

Ravilious was commissioned to paint murals on the walls of the tea room on Victoria Pier at Colwyn Bay in 1934. After the pier's partial collapse, these were thought unrecoverable, but, as of March 2018, one had been recovered in pieces and it was hoped that a second could also be saved, along with parts of another by Mary Adshead, from the pier's auditorium. He was given the rank of Honorary Captain in the Royal Marines and assigned to the Admiralty.

In February 1940, he reported to the Royal Naval barracks at Chatham Dockyard. While based there he painted ships at the dockside, barrage balloons at Sheerness and other coastal defences. Dangerous Work at Low Tide, 1940 depicts bomb disposal experts approaching a German magnetic mine on Whitstable Sands. Two members of the team Ravilious painted were later awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

On 24 May 1940 Ravilious sailed to Norway aboard HMS Highlander which was escorting HMS Glorious and the force being sent to recapture Narvik. Highlander returned to Scapa Flow before departing for Norway a second time on 31 May 1940. From the deck of Highlander, Ravilious painted scenes of both HMS Ark Royal and HMS Glorious in action. HMS Glorious in the Arctic depicts Hawker Hurricanes and Gloster Gladiators landing on the deck of Glorious as part of the evacuation of forces from Norway on 7/8 June. The following evening Glorious was sunk, with great loss of life. After Ravilious's third child was born in April 1941, the family moved out of Bank House to Ironbridge Farm near Shalford, Essex. The rent on this property was paid partly in cash and partly in paintings, which are among the few private works Ravilious completed during the war.

Death

On 28 August 1942 Ravilious flew to Reykjavík in Iceland and then travelled on to RAF Kaldadarnes. The day he arrived there, 1 September, a Lockheed Hudson aircraft had failed to return from a patrol. The next morning three aircraft were despatched at dawn to search for the missing plane and Ravilious opted to join one of the crews. The aircraft he was on also failed to return and after four days of further searching, the RAF declared Ravilious and the four-man crew lost in action. His body was never recovered and he is commemorated on the Chatham Naval Memorial. The log book belonging to the pilot of the fatal flight, in the possession of the pilot's daughter, with a hand-written note "failed to return", and an RAF official stamp "death presumed", was shown on the BBC Television programme Antiques Roadshow in March 2020.

In 1946, Ravilious's widow, Tirzah, married Anglo-Irish radio producer Henry Swanzy, having been introduced by Peggy Angus. The Minories held an exhibition on graphic art and book illustration in 2009, named "Graphic art and the art of illustration" which featured Ravilious.

In April to August 2015 the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London held what it called "the first major exhibition to survey" his watercolours, with more than 80 on display.

In 2017, The Towner Gallery marked the 75th anniversary of Ravilious' death with Ravilious & Co: The Pattern of Friendship, an exhibition that explored the relationships and working collaborations between Ravilious and a group of his friends and affiliates, including Paul Nash, John Nash, Enid Marx, Barnett Freedman, Tirzah Garwood, Edward Bawden, Thomas Hennell, Douglas Percy Bliss, Peggy Angus, Diana Low and Helen Binyon.

In 2021, Mackerel Sky, a painting by Ravilious that had been 'missing' for 82 years, was found and the new owner has lent it to the Hastings Contemporary art gallery for its Seaside Modern Exhibition.

thumb|Train Landscape, 1940 (Aberdeen Art Gallery)

From September 2021 to January 2022, the Wiltshire Museum in Devizes held an exhibition titled Eric Ravilious: Downland Man which featured loans from a number of National Museums including the V&A, the British Museum and the Imperial War Museum as well as paintings held in private collections.

To mark its reopening as The Arc in February 2022 the former Winchester Discovery Centre staged Extraordinary Everyday: The Art & Design of Eric Ravilious. The exhibition was curated for the Hampshire Cultural Trust and featured wood engravings, watercolours, books, ceramics and lithographs.

In 2022 he was the subject of the film Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War written and directed by Margy Kinmonth.

References

Sources

External links

Photograph of Ravilious
Ravilious images at Art Republic