Eric Ravilious Memoir of an Artist
- Artist: Eric Ravilious
- Published: 2007
- Publisher: The Lutterworth Press, Cambridge
- Edition: Reprint
- Format: Paperback
- Height: 25.5 cms
- Pages: 144
- Illustrations: 24 colour and 88 b&w
£28.95
Add to basketEric Ravilious Memoir of an Artist
Eric Ravilious was among the foremost English artists to emerge between the wars and one of the great original wood engravers. His body of work was wide-ranging and multi-faceted; in his relatively short career he produced an extraordinary amount of work - murals, watercolours, wood engravings, lithographs and pottery designs for Wedgwood. As successful and enterprising as he was in these diverse fields, it was in the field of watercolour landscape painting that Ravilious excelled. His tragic and untimely death in 1942, while on service as an Official War Artist, meant that his great promise was never fulfilled and it has been left to Helen Binyon to present this fascinating study of the artist to a world largely unaware of his presence. The author knew Ravilious well from their student days and has been able to draw upon her intimate knowledge of this vivid and exciting artist to make this a compelling account. The book includes an introduction by Richard Morphet, former Head of Collections at the Tate Gallery, which places Ravilious in the context of modern-day appreciation of his work and describes the close relationship between the artist and Helen Binyon, which motivated her to write this illuminating book. The book is lavishly illustrated with examples of Ravilious' work from his student days to his powerfully realised drawings and paintings as an Official War Artist.
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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.
