High Street

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Eric 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. Ravilious only held three solo exhibitions during his life from which the majority of works were bought by private collectors. Other than the large number of war-time pictures held by the Imperial War Museum, significant numbers of works by Ravilious only began to be acquired by public museums and galleries in the 1970s when the collection held by Edward Bawden started to come on the art market. [19] The largest collection is held at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, while the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden also has a major collection. [19] Eric William Ravilious: 'Missing' painting to go on show". BBC News. 25 May 2021 . Retrieved 27 May 2021. Here his instinct for the innate symbolic quality of objects and their strangeness has full play, as well as his fondness for snow and night skies. Ravilious became fascinated by submarines and spent time on board one of them to prepare lithographs for a projected book. Although relatively small numbers of these seem to have been printed, they are striking images, conveying the domesticity of life as well as the discomfort and danger. In 1938, the artist Eric Ravilious and the historian J M Richards published their celebration of the uniquely British high street. How times have changed; as Sharon White, chairman of the John Lewis Partnership, writes in the Telegraph, Britain has lost 6,000 shops in the past five years.

In 1933 Ravilious and his wife painted murals at the Midland Hotel in Morecambe. [17] In November 1933, Ravilious held his first solo exhibition at the Zwemmer Gallery in London, titled " An Exhibition of Water-Colour Drawings". [18] Twenty of the 37 works displayed were sold. [16] During 1939, Ravilious painted a series of watercolours of chalk hill figures in the English landscape. The Leicester Galleries sold three of these paintings to British public collections, the Tate, the Victoria & Albert Museum and Aberdeen Art Gallery. [19] Printmaking and illustration [ edit ] Caravans, watercolour, 1936 a b c Dearden, Chris (12 March 2018). "Bid to save pier murals amid demolition". BBC News . Retrieved 19 March 2018. a b Laity, Paul (29 April 2011). "Eric Ravilious: ups and Downs". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 27 May 2019. At the time of his death Ravilious, who had studied alongside Henry Moore under Paul Nash at the Royal College of Art in London, had only had two solo shows. But his work, influenced by Nash and earlier artists including Samuel Palmer, but in a class of its own, had caught a particular mood, as well as the eye of Kenneth Clark, who founded the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. James Russell, Ravilious in Pictures: A Country Life (edited by Tim Mainstone), Mainstone Press, Norwich (2010); ISBN 978-0955277764

Graphic art and the art of illustration: Paul Nash, John Nash, Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden and their circle. The Minories, Colchester. 2009 Works by Ravilious are also held by the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, The Faringdon Collection at Buscot Park, The Ingram Collection of Modern British and Contemporary Art, The Priseman Seabrook Collection, the Wiltshire Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 2019 the British Museum displayed one Ravilious painting, an uncharacteristic painting of a house, unlike his usual style. Ravilious was born on 22 July 1903 in Churchfield Road, Acton, London, the son of Frank Ravilious and his wife Emma ( née Ford). [4] [5] While he was still a small child the family moved to Eastbourne in Sussex, where his parents ran an antiques shop. [6] Gill Saunders: The book seems to have been the idea of Helen Binyon, daughter of writer Laurence Binyon and a student contemporary of Ravilious at the Royal College of Art. The original idea was a pictorial alphabet of shops, with Ravilious doing the illustrations. That proved a bit difficult, though, and the original publisher that Ravilious took the idea to wasn’t interested in pursuing it. He ended up talking to Noel Carrington at an imprint from Country Life books, and slowly the idea took shape that it would simply be a picture book, ideally for children, of different kinds of shops that you would find in the high street. GS: Yes, it was a sad story. Only 2,000 copies of the book had been printed before the war, and during the Blitz, part of the archive was destroyed and the plates for High Street were lost. It was only many years later that the idea of doing a facsimile of this lovely book came about. The illustrations are very charming, and now, with the passage of time, they’ve got such strong nostalgic appeal. Interest in Ravilious himself has gone up and up and up since post-war, and he has now become a much more familiar name, so it was decided that this would be a very appealing subject to do a facsimile of.

Due to the scarcity of the book and the increased interest in Ravilious' work, the High Street book is generally sold in its entire published form. Coming soon TH: Can you tell us about the bombing of the Curwen Press during the Blitz, and how this affected the book and its future?Frances Spalding (1990). 20th Century Painters and Sculptors. Antique Collectors' Club. ISBN 1-85149-106-6.

Apart from a brief experimentation with oils in 1930 – inspired by the works of Johan Zoffany – Ravilious painted almost entirely in watercolour. [21] He was especially inspired by the landscape of the South Downs around Beddingham. He frequently returned to Furlongs, the cottage of Peggy Angus. He said that his time there "altered my whole outlook and way of painting, I think because the colour of the landscape was so lovely and the design so beautifully obvious ... that I simply had to abandon my tinted drawings". [30] Some of his works, such as Tea at Furlongs, were painted there. above) 'Diving Controls II'; (below) 'Commander Looking Through Periscope' (left) and tracing (right) TH: We know our high streets have faced significant challenges in recent decades. It’s interesting, though, that J.M. Richards was already mourning the British high street in his introduction to the book from 1938. You mention in your afterword the impression that this was ‘an obituary for an endangered species – the independent shopkeeper’. Can you tell us about this atmosphere of the time, and how it influenced the book? We hope to add a further small selection of Eric Ravilious 'High Street' original 1938 lithographs to our online gallery soon.

Original 1938 'High Street' lithographs

Ravilious was educated at Eastbourne Municipal Secondary School for Boys, from September 1914 to December 1919. [7] It was later renamed as Eastbourne Grammar School. In 1919 he won a scholarship to Eastbourne School of Art and in 1922 another to study at the Design School at the Royal College of Art. There, he became a close friend of Edward Bawden [6] (his 1930 painting of Bawden at work is in the collection of the college) [8] and, from 1924, studied under Paul Nash. [9] Nash, an enthusiast for wood-engraving, encouraged him in the technique, and was impressed enough by his work to propose him for membership of the Society of Wood Engravers in 1925, and helped him to get commissions. [10] One of the reasons I was asked to write the afterword was because I had done a lot of work on a collection of watercolours and drawings which is held by the V&A, called Recording Britain. It was a project set up at the beginning of the Second World War, which commissioned artists to make watercolours and drawings of buildings and landscapes that were thought to be under threat, either from development and demolition or from bombing and invasion. There was a very similar kind of reasoning behind Recording Britain and behind High Street: let’s make a record of these lovely things before we lose them. In the mid-1920s after graduating from the Royal College, Ravilious made his early reputation with several well received wood-engravings, as well as his first solo commission - illustrations for Martin Armstrong's Desert, a Legend, published by Jonathan Cape - and a collaborative effort with Bawden, producing a mural for Morley College in South London. From his studio in Portugal, artist Ai Weiwei ponders Ravilious’s obvious enthusiasm for his final commissions, suggesting that in his excitement at producing what he thought was some of his best work, while recording life on the submarines and then destroyers off Iceland, the artist was all too aware of the risks of the role. But, Ai tells Kinmouth: “When you are so drawn into conditions, you forget the danger.”