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This superbly illustrated book was published in 2017 by Thames & Hudson in association with the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, where Andy Friend is a curator.
It starts with an introduction by Alan Powers (another Ravilious expert) entitled ‘A Star in his Firmament’. This acquaints the reader with Eric Ravilious, his circle of friends, contemporary artists, and the times and places in which they lived. It is here that William Rothenstein is first mentioned, as the Principal of the Royal College of Art (RCA) who firmly believed that artists should be involved in design ‘on the basis that the market could not support very many independent painters or sculptors’ (p. 8).
William Rothenstein by George Charles Beresford, 1920.
Throughout the book Rothenstein has an underpinning role, featuring first on page 8 and finally on page 305 with his death in 1945. He was a great friend of George Calderon, who was four years older. Born in Bradford in 1872, he trained at the Slade. He left there for France at the age of seventeen for four years and by 1910 was an established portraitist. His portrait of George Calderon (second from the right on Calderonia’s masthead) was exhibited in Chicago in 1912. Rothenstein had great ability when it came to identifying and facilitating ways to promote and benefit artists.
This book works as a biography that hinges on Eric Ravilious. It is essentially a chronological account of the artistic life that Ravilious and his friends led during the 1920s and 30s after leaving art school and before the start of the Second World War. It describes a modernist art movement in the context of life and landscape.
Eric Ravilious was born in 1903 into a family with fluctuating fortunes including bankruptcies and was at school in Eastbourne during the Great War. By the age of sixteen he had won a scholarship to the local School of Arts and Crafts. From there he took the entrance test to the RCA and was allocated to the Design course by Rothenstein. Ravilious started there in September 1922, having spent the summer rambling, camping and sketching with friends in his beloved South Downs.
He made lifelong friendships with other students including Edward Bawden (who had much in common with Ravilious), Douglas Percy Bliss (older than Ravilious, with brief First World War experience and a degree from Edinburgh), Barnett Freedman (who was from a family of exiled Russian Jews and overcame poverty, ill health and prejudice to obtain a place at the RCA), Percy Horton (born 1896, conscientious objector with associated punishment), Enid Marx (from London, school at Roedean), Peggy Angus (North London Collegiate, admitted to the RCA at seventeen, from a Muswell Hill family), and Helen Binyon (good friend of Peggy Angus, also straight from private school, and a daughter of Laurence Binyon, George’s close friend from Oxford days). Paul Nash, described by Enid Marx as ‘the magnet that drew us together’ (p. 19), inspired them as an RCA visiting instructor during 1924 and 1925 and had a long-lasting impact on this generation of students and their work.
What I like about this book is its descriptions of landscapes and rural life, whether verbal or visual through the reproductions of artwork. Although London was where many of the group met and a place that they inevitably needed for contacts etc., they mainly gravitated towards rural living, whether permanent or temporary. Peggy Angus’s rural retreat ‘Furlongs’, a ‘primitive shepherd’s cottage’ near Glynde in the South Downs, was regularly visited by Eric Ravilious and his wife Tirzah (they married in 1930) as well as many other friends. Several of the friends lived in Essex, Eric and Tirzah initially sharing Brick House in Great Bardfield with Edward Bawden (who subsequently bought it and lived there for thirty-nine years), then moving to Bank House in Castle Hedingham.
‘New Year Snow’, 1935.
I can’t do justice to the work of the artists, but the watercolours, wood engravings and line drawings are beautiful. They evoke a pre-Second World War creative and adventurous attitude to life that reminds me of aspects of my parents’ childhoods in the 1920s and 30s. Many of Rothenstein’s protégés designed for organisations such as the Council for Art and Industry and the London Passenger Transport Board, who commissioned background displays and posters from Ravilious and Bawden respectively.
Ravilious at work on a background display for the 1937 Paris International Exhibition.
There are also examples of murals, book covers, pattern paper designs for publishers, block printed paper and marbled paper amongst the many reproductions in this book demonstrating the versatility of the group of friends, as well as creative work that was not only beautiful but useful.
Part of this creativity was a sense of freedom. This was reflected not just in their art but also in relationships. Eric Ravilious was always falling in love both before and after his marriage to Tirzah. Though hurt and shocked, she said when she heard about his affair with Helen Binyon: ‘[I] quickly recovered my sense of proportion and when I once knew what was happening, things were easier than they had been when Eric had just been feeling guilty and concealing what he really felt […] I couldn’t blame Helen for taking him away from me, because Diana [Low] had already done so’ (p. 167).
As the 1930s drew to a close it was clear that war was getting nearer, but the role of artists became less clear. Thanks partly to the War Artists Advisory Committee Ravilious and many of his group of friends were attached to various forces as war artists. Eric Ravilious was assigned to the navy initially and visited a range of places from Chatham to North Norway and Newhaven. He had previously painted at Newhaven and on this occasion when there was regular bombing ‘he would show both insouciance in the face of danger and capture the basis for six completed watercolours from the cliffs overlooking the West Quay’ (p. 286).
‘Norway 1940’
In March 1942, while Eric was working as a war artist (he had recently been transferred to the RAF), his wife Tirzah was coping with a young son, two babies under the age of two, and serious health problems leading to a major operation. Eric spent time at home and during the summer he was given Air Ministry permission to paint in Iceland. By the end of August he was there. Flying conditions were hazardous with no radar and instruments that were unreliable because of proximity to magnetic north. On 2 September 1942 the Hudson bomber in which Ravilious was a passenger left RAF Kaldadarnes to look for a missing aircraft and never returned.
Thank you for this beautifully written and illustrated post. The sense of liberty described, and thirst for adventure during this period resonates with me too, remembering my father (although not the bohemian lifestyle, to my knowledge). How tragic that their generation then had to go through World War II. It’s very sad that Eric died in 1942; I love the photo of him in Paris!