High Street

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The vividness of Ravilious’s situation sometimes drove him to stay up all night painting. “The seas in the Arctic Circle are the most intense blue you can imagine,” he wrote to his wife. “Almost cerulean.” The intense commitment to his work may also have been practical; a bid to make up for the loss of some of his work that was sunk in the Atlantic while on board a ship bound for a UK government propaganda exhibition in South America. “Being a war artist wasn’t a soft option,” says Alan Bennett in the film. “Painting was his active service and he gave his life for it.” a b c d Alan Powers (14 July 2022). "The real and romantic: the life and work of Eric Ravilious". Art UK . Retrieved 25 February 2023. 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. [47] [48] He also undertook glass designs for Stuart Crystal in 1934, graphic advertisements for London Transport and furniture work for Dunbar Hay in 1936. [28] Ravilious and Bawden were both active in the campaign by the Artists' International Association to support the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Throughout 1938 and 1939, Ravilious spent time working in Wales, the south of France and at Aldeburgh to prepare works for his third one-man show, which was held at the Arthur Tooth & Sons Gallery in 1939. [16] Watercolour [ edit ]

In Kinmonth’s documentary, other admirers of his oeuvre speak of Ravilious’s skill at capturing a moment in time. The writer Robert Macfarlane, referring to the painting Midnight Sun, which depicts a depth charge ready to be dropped into the sea, describes “classic Ravilious” as when “everything is in potencia, at once profoundly serene and profoundly disturbing”. GS: Yes, there definitely is, in some of the ways he chooses to represent his subjects. If we look at the submariner supplies shop for example, you’ve got the diving gear and the helmets in the window, and it’s quite dark and mysterious. He doesn’t use many bright colours in that one, and it will always remind me of the story of Salvador Dalí coming to London to give a lecture, and wearing a diving helmet. Powers, Alan (15 July 2012). Eric Ravilious: Imagined Realities. Philip Wilson Publishers. p.143. ISBN 978-1-78130-001-5.James Russell, Ravilious in Pictures: A Travelling Artist (edited by Tim Mainstone), Mainstone Press, Norwich (2012); ISBN 978-0955277788 above) 'Diver' (left), and a mysterious, surreal print (right) in which the artist's hand is depicted drawing its own underwater image; (below) 'Testing Escape Apparatus', illustrating Ravilious' love of circular, 'moving' composition GS: Yes, it was a sad story. Only 2,000 copies of the book had been printed before the war, and during the Blitz, part of the archive was destroyed and the plates for High Street were lost. It was only many years later that the idea of doing a facsimile of this lovely book came about. The illustrations are very charming, and now, with the passage of time, they’ve got such strong nostalgic appeal. Interest in Ravilious himself has gone up and up and up since post-war, and he has now become a much more familiar name, so it was decided that this would be a very appealing subject to do a facsimile of. In the mid-1920s after graduating from the Royal College, Ravilious made his early reputation with several well received wood-engravings, as well as his first solo commission - illustrations for Martin Armstrong's Desert, a Legend, published by Jonathan Cape - and a collaborative effort with Bawden, producing a mural for Morley College in South London. On returning from Norway, Ravilious was posted to Portsmouth from where he painted submarine interiors at Gosport and coastal defences at Newhaven. [37] 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. [16] In October 1941 Ravilious transferred to Scotland, having spent six months based at Dover. In Scotland, Ravilious first stayed with John Nash and his wife at their cottage on the Firth of Forth and painted convoy subjects from the signal station on the Isle of May. At the Royal Naval Air Station in Dundee, Ravilious drew, and sometimes flew in, the Supermarine Walrus seaplanes based there. [36]

Eric Ravilious: The Story of High Street was high on the artist’s admirers’ Christmas wish lists last year, despite several other new books about him having been published during 2008 by private presses and trade publishers. But there is little danger of generating a glut in the insatiable Ravilious market. The artist and his inter-war contemporaries, including Edward Ardizzone, Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman and John Nash, depicted the landscape and life of rural and urban England during a period of accelerating change. Although they are all admired, Ravilious is particularly revered, perhaps because he died at the age of 39, while serving as an official war artist stationed in Iceland. His continuing appeal puzzles some North America readers, but he has advocates there too. ‘O’Connor’s my favourite wood engraver of them all,’ wrote the American artist Vance Gerry to John Randle of Matrix twenty years ago. ‘Ravilious next.’Eric Ravilious went on to design for Wedgwood who, in 1937, brought out the George VI commemorative Coronation Mug, and in the same year the (much collected) Alphabet Mug and Nursery Ware designs. In 1938 Country Life published the book High Street, by J. M. Richards, for which Eric Ravilious supplied a series of lithographs documenting the charms of certain Victorian high street shops – some no longer extant such as the Saddlers and Harness Maker’s shop, or the Fireworks Shop. James Russell, Eric Ravilious Downland Man, with a preface by David Dawson, Wiltshire Museum (2021), ISBN 978-0-947723-17-0 Moreover, the spread of pernicious anti-car policies, such as low traffic neighbourhoods and the London ultra-low emission zone, can hardly have helped stores that rely on footfall to drive custom. Ravilious only held three solo exhibitions during his life from which the majority of works were bought by private collectors. Other than the large number of war-time pictures held by the Imperial War Museum, significant numbers of works by Ravilious only began to be acquired by public museums and galleries in the 1970s when the collection held by Edward Bawden started to come on the art market. [19] The largest collection is held at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, while the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden also has a major collection. [19]