Culture | Eric Ravilious

Another world, another time

Drawing on the past

A shore thing

IT IS August 1939, and the table is set for tea. There are loaves of bread, a pat of butter, white mugs, jugs and a teapot. It is hot. The wheat in the fields beyond the garden walls is ready to be harvested, and a large, battered, black umbrella has become an improvised parasol. The two empty chairs are mismatched, brought hastily from the kitchen so the view can be enjoyed in the last of the sunlight.

It is a timeless scene, but this is England on the cusp of change. Within three years, Eric Ravilious, the painter of this inviting afternoon sight, will be killed in a plane crash somewhere near Iceland at the age of 39. As “Ravilious”, at the Dulwich Picture Gallery until August 31st, demonstrates, these vivid, unassuming paintings are windows on the world he left behind.)

Favouring watercolour above all other mediums, and choosing landscapes, interiors and vignettes of town life as his subjects, Ravilious positioned himself closer to illustration and design than to the cutting edge. His approach was undoubtedly literal. He rarely wanted to talk about his work; all his pictures are based on careful observation, their titles utilitarian: “Wet Afternoon”, “The Greenhouse: Cyclamen and Tomatoes”, “A Farmhouse Bedroom”.

Tightly composed and rendered in clear colours and precise brushstrokes, they make popular cards and appealing designs for tea towels. He knew this, and during his lifetime, he designed pottery for Wedgwood and illustrated several books.

Ravilious’s work has gained in attention in the past few years. Alexandra Harris’s book of 2010, “Romantic Moderns”, has been important in highlighting how recent and imminent war bred premature nostalgia, invested art and literature with urgency, and encouraged an invigorated appreciation of tradition.

The 90-or-so watercolours in this show, dating from the 1930s and his time as an official war artist, reveal how firmly Ravilious was a part of this “modern English renaissance”. His eye embraced quaint objects and everyday sights, such as abandoned caravans, naval dockyards, interiors of bedrooms, greenhouses and trains, boats and bathing machines on the Suffolk coast. He showed scant interest in figures, and he was at his best when portraying the sweeping landscapes of southern England; atmospheric, original interpretations of famous views and favourite places.

Many of Ravilious’s pictures read like scenes from a novel, though one that is frequently devoid of people. The viewer is left to fill in the story. Ingenious compositions place him or her in the picture, and then lead the eye on specific pathways towards the distance. As time progressed, Ravilious’s instinctive sense of design became increasingly sophisticated. He became more confident in portraying familiar sights in his own unusual way. His framing is particularly bold—the “Wilmington Giant” is ringed with barbed wire and jutting fence poles, for example, and a white chalk horse seen out of a train window in “Train Landscape” manages to be prominent, despite being half the size of the serial numbers painted on the inside of the train door.

These paintings offer a sense of their time, and not merely because of the subject matter they depict. Their exaggerated use of pattern and distorted angles of perspective reflect not only the influence of post-impressionism, but also of popular contemporary design. Ravilious’s reduced shapes and elegant forms echo the obsession that Art-Deco artists had with streamlined simplicity. And he delights in patterned upholstery and wallpaper with the enthusiasm and understanding of a textile designer.

Ravilious also gave each scene and every inch of the paper his undivided attention, as if the artist were seeing something for the last time. Visitors to this exhibition will share in all he conveys about the sheer, simple pleasure of just looking.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Another world, another time"

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