Ravilious Pilot Boat up for auction!

Eric Ravilious, Pilot Boat, 1939

Having spent some time in a private collection in the United States, Pilot Boat is back in the UK and up for auction at Sotheby's. I'm not sure I've ever seen this watercolour in person so I'm looking forward to visiting on Sunday, when I join Frances Christie and Simon Martin for a panel discussion about Place in Modern British Art (see previous post for details).

A few years ago I wrote the following to accompany the illustration of Pilot Boat in Ravilious in Pictures: A Travelling Artist. As usual Tim Mainstone and I spent a long time pondering which works to include in the book - a process you certainly wouldn't describe as painful - eventually picking this one as an atmospheric depiction of a French Channel port on the eve of war. In many instances we can revisit the sites of Ravilious watercolours and find them unchanged, but not in this case...

If Ravilious painted an interior scene on a painting trip you can be sure that the weather made working outdoors impossible. Le Havre was so cold he could only work outside for short periods, so it was as well that he had picked a hotel in such a good location, just 100 yards from the Quai George V. He was first captivated by the sleek lines and yellow masts of a steam yacht belonging to the Rothschild family - ‘the most elegant boat I ever saw’ - but, as he reported, ‘there are splendid boats wherever you go, and striped and red buoys and a special green water, a grassy green’. 

Ordinary people were fascinated to see an artist at work but, with the French newspapers dominated by discussion of the imminent conflict, Ravilious was treated with suspicion by officials who perhaps took him for a spy. ‘A gendarme questioned me closely,’ he reported on one occasion, ‘but retired beaten by my Pigeon French.’ Within a year Ravilious would be questioned far more aggressively by armed British servicemen as he drew port scenes in his capacity of war artist.

For the people of Le Havre the anticipated Nazi invasion was swift. On June 13 1940, as thousands of Allied troops evacuated by sea, German forces entered the city, where they remained in occupation for the next four years. During this time the garrison turned France’s second largest port into a massive fortress, and this spelled disaster for the city when Allied forces landed in Normandy in June 1944. Beginning on 5th September RAF bombers and naval guns blasted the city, reducing the centre to rubble and filling the waterways with wrecks. The port Edward Wadsworth had known for 30 years, and which he described in correspondence with Ravilious as ‘a real gold mine of matter’, was destroyed.

The return of peace brought to Le Havre the renowned architect and town planner Auguste Perret, who set about building a new city over the ruins of the old, using modern materials with panache in a 20-year project of unparalleled ambition. Indeed, it has been recognised as such by UNESCO, which in 2005 designated the rebuilt port a World Heritage Site. As a reminder of the old port we have this painting, almost a winter version of Seurat’s luminous harbour scenes, with a similar spaciousness and even the same mooring posts. In the low sunlight the clean lines of the pilot boat stand out against a background that seems almost on the point of melting away, with ghostly figures dimly perceptible on the far side of the water the only sign of life. 

A fine marine study, the painting is also filled with foreboding; ‘I shall be surprised,’ he wrote on returning home, ‘If there isn’t a war by the middle of May and drawing and all other sensible things fade into the background, though Tooth’s assure me their business will carry on as usual.’

This is an extract from Ravilious in Pictures: A Travelling Artist (Mainstone Press). 

Pilot Boat is Lot 12 in Sotheby's auction of Modern British & Irish Art, which will be held on 23 November. You can view the lots between 18-23 Nov. 

I'll be talking about Place in Modern British Art with Frances Christie and Simon Martin at 1pm on Sunday 20 Nov.