Eric Ravilious: 'Halstead Road in Snow'

Eric Ravilious, Halstead Road in Snow, 1935 (private collection)

Tyre tracks disappear down a snow-covered lane, beside an elegant Georgian house, as if the people who made them were here just a moment ago. We are in Castle Hedingham, at the junction of Queen Street and Sheepcot Road – also known as Halstead Road – and snow is falling, large flakes covering the picture surface and pulling the eye this way and that. Ravilious was fascinated by winter, relishing the light and colours peculiar to the season, and on this occasion he hurried over breakfast so as not to miss a morning snow shower, starting a drawing outside and then finishing it in his studio.

‘Scratching the spots all over the drawing later with a penknife was a change,’ he wrote to Helen Binyon, ‘And I enjoyed it. I have in mind a series of drawings of houses in this village because in Winter they are such a lovely colour.’

He was fortunate to live in a village with many fine buildings, some dating back to the 15^th century. Sheepcot House, which can be seen behind the tree in this painting, was built during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and was the birthplace in 1682 of naturalist Mark Catesby. He became later in life a distinguished painter, so much so that his painting 'A blue grosbeak (passerina caerulea) and sweet bay (Magnolia virginiana)' was included in Tate Britain’s 2011 exhibition Watercolour, in which ‘The Vale of the White Horse’ by Eric Ravilious also featured.

Today the horse chestnut tree still stands on Chapel Green, as the patch of grass at the junction is known, but the lanes are not so quiet. The tracks shown here – loose, flowing lines in contrast to the hard geometry of the buildings - were made by bicycles and prams, and they remind us that pre-war Castle Hedingham was a predominantly pedestrian settlement. Local shops catered to most needs, while coal, bread and milk were delivered. On one occasion Ravilious wrote,

‘The milkman made me laugh today. We write up any money owing on the side of the door, and I asked if we owed tenpence. He put his head in and said, “Yes, the writing’s on the wall.”’

And then there was the postman, on whom Ravilious relied almost totally for communication with the world outside the village. With telephones still comparatively rare and unreliable, all arrangements, commissions and payments were made by post, and waiting for the postman was a national pastime.

‘I woke up with a feeling that I wouldn’t sleep any more and might as well get up,’ Ravilious reported one winter morning, ‘And saw the aged postman down the street. He took his time of course – he has a zigzag course and a shuffle that has all time before it – and until each letter has been looked at carefully with a lamp you don’t get it.’

This is an excerpt from 'Ravilious in Pictures: A Country Life', published by The Mainstone Press. 

No. 29 Bus by Eric Ravilious: as featured in Time Out

'No. 29 Bus' by Eric Ravilious (1934)

            Asked in later years for a biographical sketch, Ravilious noted his ‘tendency to paint in sequences (groups of broken down tractors and old cars and buses in fields, the discarded machinery of Essex)’. Here, an antique double-decker faces the sunlit, open countryside, as if about to drive away, yet it is only the shell or skeleton of a bus, standing not on wheels but on four barrels. With its tapering, top-heavy wooden body it could be an eccentric river boat, awaiting a rising tide. The number ‘29’ has been painted on a folded piece of canvas or cardboard and wedged behind the staircase, perhaps as an aid to identification for potential buyers.

This is probably a view looking away from the ‘repair yard for steam engines’ that Tirzah later recalled, where Ravilious also discovered the subjects for ‘Talbot-Darracq’ and ‘Tractor’. Engineer and blacksmith John Thomas Chapman began repairing steam engines and other agricultural machinery in 1870 at a yard on Bell Lane, [in Great Bardfield, Essex] and the business was still going in the 1930s; the bungalows of Durham Close now occupy the site.

Tirzah noted that some of the engines were in working order, ‘Though the bindweed was climbing over them and there was a hen’s nest in one. The door of the shed where they repaired wheels was splashed with a variety of paints and inside were some lovely red wheels.

‘Eric was very excited with the yard,’ she remarked, ‘And set to work drawing the engines and the car, afterwards tinting in watercolour his very careful drawings.’

But why is this bus here, in a country junkyard? It looks like a city vehicle, a double-decker with the distinctive curved stairway of the B-type London buses built by the London General Omnibus Company in Walthamstow before and during World War I. Hundreds of these vehicles were used as ambulances and troop transports on the Western Front, their bodywork painted khaki and windows replaced by wooden panels. After the war some returned to service in the capital, but were quickly replaced by newer models and dispatched to the provinces, until the passage of time caught up with them even in rural districts. Eventually it became quite common to see a B-type bus dismantled in this way, its cab and chassis perhaps put to use in haulage while the body waits to be transformed into a henhouse, shed or, possibly, somebody’s home.

            Following the move to Castle Hedingham Ravilious soon found a new junkyard, where he made the wood engraving of ‘The Hansom Cab and the Pigeons’(1935): ‘An area wholly mud given up to every sort of junk, beds and bicycles and cartwheels with ducks and hens and black-faced enormous sheep to liven the scene…’

‘These brutes,’ he added, ‘Run about the place jumping pans and corrugated iron with a beautiful agility and a great deal of clatter.’

This is an extract from 'Ravilious in Pictures: A Country Life', available to order now from The Mainstone Press. You can see B-type buses in slightly better condition at the Imperial War Museum - look out for Old Bill - and at the London Transport Museum.

Ravilious in Essex - the Map

I've started putting together a Google map of interesting locations mentioned in or connected to 'Ravilious in Pictures: A Country Life'. What next - an app?! I thought I might be able to put the map itself here but it's a bit beyond my technical skills, so you can find it here.

Ravilious in Pictures: A Country Life

Ravilious in Pictures: A Country Life is the third in a series of books celebrating the life and work of Eric Ravilious (1903‐42). In 1932 Ravilious and his wife Tirzah moved to the Essex village of Great Bardfield, and for the remaining decade of his life they lived within an easy cycle ride of the village, first in Castle Hedingham and then at Ironbridge Farm, near Shalford. It was in north-west Essex that his children were born, and it was here that he found the inspiration for a series of watercolours that together form a remarkable portrait of country life in the 1930s.

Ravilious sought out both the beautiful and the unusual, and the twenty-two watercolours in this volume provide a unique record of village life that includes everything from the splendid Georgian architecture of the Castle Hedingham vicarage to abandoned steam engines and other relics of the past. Each picture is accompanied by an essay which explores the places depicted and introduces characters and stories hidden behind the scenes. 

Ravilious in Pictures: A Country Life shows a fine English artist at home, among friends and family, enjoying the pleasures and enduring the trials of village life in the 1930s. The book is a companion volume to Sussex and the Downs (2009) and The War Paintings (2010); taken together, the three books form an unusual and compelling biography of Ravilious, drawing on his correspondence, original research and other sources to create an intimate portrait of the artist and his world,

Ravilious in Pictures: A Country Life will be published by The Mainstone Press in April 2011.

Reviews for Ravilious in Pictures: Sussex and the Downs

‘Beautiful’ (Stella magazine, Sunday Telegraph, Dec 2009)

‘Ravilious’s watercolour landscapes of the South Downs … are beautifully reproduced here alongside insightful essays…’ (London Review of Books, Jan 2010)

‘The next volume from Mainstone Press is eagerly awaited.’ (Sarah Drury, The Art Book, Aug 2010)
‘James Russell’s writing has the clarity and concision of the paintings, and is both properly informative and enjoyably readable... Glorious.’ (Andrew Lambirth, The Art Newspaper, Sept 2010)

Reviews for Ravilious in Pictures: The War Paintings

‘A vivid portrait of the artist’ (Country Life magazine, Dec 2010)

‘A lovely and melancholy new volume’ (Ian Collins, Eastern Daily Press, Dec 2010)

‘Fantastic’ (Emily Rhodes, The Spectator Arts Blog, Dec 2010)

The Art of Germany... and Ravilious the Letter-Writer

George Grosz - Grey Day (1921)

There were moments during the just finished series 'The Art of Germany' when a viewer might, having flicked to BBC4 unexpectedly, have imagined that this was a new Steve Coogan vehicle - a parody of an art programme. Is it just the physical resemblance, or is there something in Andrew Graham-Dixon's deadpan delivery that suggests a comic mind at work behind the scenes? Or is it the subject perhaps? The art of Germany, at least in this survey, has rarely been light-hearted. Romantic idealists, tortured souls, a generation scarred by war, the Austrian watercolourist and his strutting thugs, post-war doom and gloom... No room for pre-Raphaelite beauty in this picture, nor Frenchmen with waterlilies, nor soup cans. I had never thought before last night that Joseph Beuys was fun but, compared to what went before, he was.

Last night's final instalment seemed all the more weighty, given that I'd spent the day reading through Eric Ravilious's letters. As a painter Ravilious had a touch so light that his watercolours can sometimes appear almost translucent, and he was as good a letter-writer as he was an artist. Writing to his lover Helen Binyon every day and occasionally twice a day, he noted with a poet's laconic phraseology the minor excitements of life in rural Essex.

Eric Ravilious - Village Street (1936)

One morning he woke up to see the aged Castle Hedingham postman coming down the street: 

'He took his time of course – he has a zigzag course and a shuffle that has all time before it – and until each letter has been looked at carefully with a lamp you don’t get it.'

And after visiting his wife Tirzah in hospital after the birth of their first child, he noted: 

'They produce tea at every visit and any hour and actually offer cigarettes. I didn’t know hospitals were ever like this.’

On another occasion he reported with some amusement how an earnest Paul Nash tried to persuade him and others to take Surrealism and the other art movements of the time more seriously. Ravilious took his work seriously, but he looked on the world with a humorous eye.

Not that the German artists discussed so brilliantly by Andrew Graham-Dixon were lacking in wit. A brutal satirical humour pervades the work of George Grosz and a more subtle variant the paintings of Max Beckmann. We were treated to the sight of Georg Baselitz's scandalous 1963 work 'Die Gross Nacht im Eimer', although AGD stood in front of it to obscure the giant phallus.

Anselm Kiefer - Milky Way (1985-7)

I have spent some time in Germany, particularly in Cologne and Berlin, and as I watched I tried to square the BBC4 version of the country's art history with what I knew. Was it all really that heavy? That grim? Who did AGD leave out?

Anselm Kiefer? Surely an artist who should have been included, given his fascination for German history and culture - but by no means a light-hearted painter. Then there are Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, whose work in the 1960s shared some qualities with Pop Art, but not its lightness.

These last two lived and worked in Cologne, which is home to one of Europe's best modern art galleries, Museum Ludwig. When it opened in 1986, the Ludwig was one of the first museums devoted exclusively to 20th century art, and in particular to the art Hitler termed degenerate. In fact the initial donation of work that was to become the Museum Ludwig collection was made in 1946 by a local lawyer, who had amassed and preserved work by Kirchner, Eric Hechel, Otto Mueller and other Expressionist painters.

Among these are paintings of great beauty and sensitivity - intense, perhaps, but full of colour. The dynamic use of colour was what first attracted me to Expressionist painting, and my (slightly hazy) memory of first visiting Museum Ludwig is of a fantastic room full of bold, energetic paintings. I loved Kirchner and the rest not because their work was grim but because it was spirited and exciting.

Otto Mueller - Lovers (1919)

This is a minor quibble. German art has been woefully - if not surprisingly - neglected in this country, and Andrew Graham-Dixon has provided us with a scholarly, entertaining introduction.

Ravilious, incidentally, was well aware of growing international tensions and the threat of war from 1936 onwards, but prefered not to dwell on the subject. Here, he reports to Helen Binyon an encounter in 'the Gentlemen' at the Geological Museum in London (July 36):
I was there in the morning and three or four window cleaners were having a quiet smoke. One said 'What's this place then' - 'Oh it's geology' - and then slowly and thoughtfully 'it's appertaining to the minerals what's in the earth, what's in the bowels of the earth'. After a bit somebody said 'I wonder how long it would take a poor bugger to clean all the windows by himself.'