DESIGN: Edward Bawden | Eric Ravilious
- Artist: Edward, Eric Bawden, Ravilious
- Published: 2008
- Publisher: Antique Collectors' Club, Woodbridge
- Edition: -
- Format: Hardback
- Height: 22cm
- Pages: 64
- Illustrations: Includes 71 colour and 51 b&w illustrations
£12.50
Add to basketDESIGN: Edward Bawden | Eric Ravilious
An excellent introduction to the work of two British designers Edward Bawden (1903-1989) and Eric Ravilious (1903-1942). This fascinating book illustrates every aspect of their creativity, featuring designs for wallpaper, posters, book jackets, trade cards and Wedgwood ceramics, to name but a few. Design opens with an informed and engaging essay by Peyton Skipwith, who, from the late 1960s, acted as Edward Bawden's principal dealer. Bawden and Ravilious both attended the Design School of the Royal College of Art. It was here that they met and started to experiment with print-making - marking the beginning of an extremely creative but tragically short-lived friendship. Ravilious was killed at the age of thirty-nine in an air-sea rescue mission during the Second World War; Edward Bawden survived him by forty-six years.
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Artists Biography
(b Braintree, Essex, 10 March 1903; d Saffron Walden, Essex, 21 Nov 1989). English printmaker, graphic designer, illustrator and painter. He studied at the School of Art in Cambridge (1918–22) and at the Design School of the Royal College of Art (1922–6), where he was a contemporary of Eric Ravilious and was taught by Paul Nash. While still a student he and Ravilious were commissioned by Sir Joseph Duveen to paint a mural at Morley College (destr. 1940; repainted as the Canterbury Tales in 1958), London. After graduating he worked on a large variety of projects for the Curwen Press at Plaistow, London, and subsequently for many other publishers, producing book illustrations and cover designs, posters and advertisements, leaflets and calendars, including commissions for Shell-Mex, Westminster Bank and the London Transport Board. He held his first one-man show, mainly of landscapes showing the influence of Nash, at the Zwemmer Gallery in London in 1933. During World War II he served as an Official War Artist in the British Army, travelling to Belgium, France and the Middle East and portraying such places as Roman Catholic Church at Addis Ababa (1941; London, Tate). His later work, particularly as a graphic designer, is notable for its simplicity of line and its wit, but he also returned to large-scale mural painting, including murals for the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion at the Festival of Britain, London (1950–51); the British pavilion at Expo ’67, Montreal; and Edward Bawden’s Oxford at Blackwell’s Bookshop (1972–3), Oxford. He also became well-known for his linocuts, among them Nine London Monuments (Editions Alecto, 1966; see Howes, pp. 96–7) and Six London Markets (Curwen Prints, 1967; see Howes, p. 98).
Artists Biography
Watercolourist, wood engraver, lithographer and mural decorator, Ravilious was born in Acton but grew up in Eastbourne, Sussex, where he studied until receipt of a scholarship to the Royal College of Art. Student in the Design School of the College, Ravilious was taught by Paul Nash and became friends, and sometime work companion, with Edward Bawden. In 1930 he married the artist Tirzah Garwood and befriended Sussex based artist Peggy Angus. It is from her home, Furlongs, near Firle on the Sussex Downs just outside of Brighton, that Ravilious began to paint his Downland subjects.
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 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.
Ravilious was appointed Official War Artist in 1940. His watercolours during this period document the setting up of coastal defences at, amongst other places, Newhaven in Sussex; he also worked on a series of lithographs which record life as a submariner patrolling the Channel waters. In 1942, aged 39, Ravilious was posted to Iceland, and in September he participated in an air/sea rescue on board a Hudson plane in search of an aircraft that had disappeared on the previous day. The Hudson itself, however, was lost and Ravilious, along with four others, never returned from this mission.
Ravilious is well known for his wood engravings and for his designs, but more recently it is his watercolours which have, perhaps, been of central interest. If artists are sometimes defined by their work on a particular area - Palmer by Shoreham, for instance - Ravilious, as Peyton Skipwith suggests, is the 'artist par excellence of the South Downs'* Ravilious's austerely beautiful watercolours are almost always devoid of people. But it is this very lack which Ravilious explores: so often in his paintings there is a conspicuousness of absence. There is evidence, almost always, of the land having been traversed and used: the paths are well trodden, the fences zigzag their way across the terrain and pieces of machinery lie rusting in the fields. These man-made artefacts are presences by association to the absent walker, farmer and machine operator; and the lack of actual presences can sometimes lend a certain sadness to the poignant beauty of the pictures.
