What’s Coming Up? 8 Eric Ravillious, Artist

Eric Ravilious, Artist, 1903-1942

Some of you may remember my article about James Ravilious, the renowned photographer who recorded a disappearing Devon back in the 1980s and 90s. What you may not know is that his father Eric was a famous war artist who tragically lost his life on a mission over Iceland in 1942. Eric was born in 1903 in Acton, London, and later moved to Eastbourne. At the age of sixteen he enrolled at the Eastbourne School of Art for three years, and then received a scholarship to the Royal College of Art where he was tutored by one of my favourite artists, Paul Nash, from 1923. He was taught wood engraving too, and after he qualified he returned to the Eastbourne School in 1925 to teach on a part-time basis. In 1930 he married James’s mother, Tirzah Garwood, who was also an excellent artist of her time. I personally discovered Eric’s work at a Pyles auction in Hatherleigh, where I bought my first Wedgewood dinner plate with his “Persephone” design around the perimeter. It was easy to see the influence that his wood engraving background had on his work. Later, I collected the “Gardens” series of dinner plates, which featured scenes from traditional domestic English gardens of the 1930s.

I was delighted to find one of his designs on a Wedgewood lemonade jug on ebay, which I managed to snap up for the starting price of £300. It was part of Eric’s “Garden Implements” series, and quite rare. I knew this was a relatively cheap price due to a small crack near the handle, but I still managed to sell it on for considerably more a few weeks later - unfortunately, a feat I have not yet repeated since! But Ravilious ceramic designs are still highly sought after today, so keep a look out for them at any auction. In 1933, he exhibited watercolours in his first one -man show at the Zwemmer Gallery in Morecambe. Again, the line work experience from wood engraving shines through in this medium. He uses a brush technique to “hatch” areas of colour, and also parallel sketch lines to give a slightly surreal look to landscapes. He is considered to belong to the most notable professional “naive” school of his time, in the Art Deco period of the 1920s and 30s, influenced strongly by his mentor, Paul Nash, the first recognised English surrealist painter. I first saw and appreciated a large watercolour by Eric “in the flesh” in James’s living room in Chulmleigh, where it was hanging over the fireplace, and I have since acquired quite a few books illustrating his works. In one of these books there is an interior scene of a simple iron bedstead in a room with highly decorative wallpaper. It is quite mesmerising, and James took an almost identical interior photograph of a very similar room and bedstead fifty years later in a Devon cottage. Whether this was a deliberate conscious choice by James, in homage to his father’s work, or just a coincidence, we shall never know.