Ravilious Lifeboat Print: Help for Heroes

Eric Ravilious, Lifeboat, 1938 (DACS/artist's estate)

The Towner Gallery has recently acquired 'Lifeboat', a 1938 watercolour by Eric Ravilious, on long-term loan. This gorgeous painting, which featured in 'Eric Ravilious: Going Modern, Being British' at RWA Bristol earlier this year, is unusually colourful for an artist who tended to prefer more muted tones.

The Mainstone Press, publisher of the 'Ravilious in Pictures' series, has just published a limited edition giclee print of 'Lifeboat', which for a short time is available exclusively from Towner. A percentage from all sales of the print will go to Help for Heroes, the charity chosen by the painting's owner. This seems fitting, given that Ravilious died on active service as a war artist.

'Lifeboat' is also reproduced in 'Ravilious in Pictures: A Travelling Artist', which I will be discussing next month, along with the other books in the series, at several illustrated talks (see panel on right). The V&A Study Day has sold out, but you can still buy tickets for the other events - if there's something you'd like to know about Ravilious or his work, come along and ask!

John Piper, Newhaven and the Towner Appeal

The Towner Gallery in Eastbourne has appealed for help in buying two interesting pieces by John Piper, both showing the harbour at Newhaven. Both pictures are currently on show at the gallery, as part of its summer blockbuster, 'John Piper in Kent and Sussex', and they're among the best on display.

Piper is an intriguing figure, not least because his work is so varied and, it has to be said, uneven. Looking through 'Piper's Places',  the book he put together with Richard Ingrams towards the end of his (Piper's) life, I was struck by this. You'd go from a beautifully detailed, atmospheric drawing of a country church to a scribbled sketch of some piece of coastline that had evidently caught his fancy at a particular moment, in a particular light perhaps, or with clouds looming.

Eric Ravilious, Newhaven Harbour (litho), 1937

Of course he went everywhere (in England and Wales, at least), setting the trend for his generation by leaping in his car, at a time when owning one was still a luxury, and buzzing about the countryside, photographing and sketching everything that caught his interest - churches and ancient monuments, elegant streets, hills, ruins, harbours...

Edward Bawden, Newhaven, 1935

I think his work reflects this restless, sometimes hectic, motion. At its best it can capture the spirit of a place perfectly, and bring something new to the artistic process too, and this is especially true of the collages he made in the 1930s. His collage of the Castle pub and the harbour is in striking contrast to the paintings Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden made at the port around the same time.

The Towner has secured £75,000 from The Art Fund and other sources towards the purchase price of Piper's 'The Castle' and 'Newhaven' - a wonderfully energetic pen and ink drawing, but still needs another £10,000 to complete the sale. Perhaps some generous sponsor has already stepped forward, or perhaps the money will come from thousands of people, each giving a little. They're well worth the investment, I'd say. Thank heavens Piper had the sense not to become a solicitor...

Later: the extra money was found and Towner now owns both pictures - once again the Art Fund has helped a museum buy work which is both popular and important. 

Rav at the Fry, and Betjeman's 'Essex'

It was wonderful to read the other day that the Fry Gallery in Saffron Walden, Essex, has bought two watercolours by Eric Ravilious, namely  'Caravans' (1936) and 'Geraniums and Carnations' (1938).

The former is a personal favourite, and you might like to read the post here and comments here for a bit of background info. There's also an essay about the painting in 'Ravilious in Pictures: Sussex and the Downs'.

I think the Fry is being very astute in building up its Ravilious collection. His reputation has grown considerably since Alan Powers curated the 2003 retrospective at the Imperial War Museum, but with interest in interwar British art and culture increasing steadily you can expect to hear a lot more about the Boy over the next few years. Towner Gallery in Eastbourne has an impressive hoard of Ravs but are yet to devote a permanent exhibition space to him.

Betjeman waits for a train

So perhaps the artist's chosen home will become an important centre for his work. I'm currently editing the text for the third volume in the 'Ravilious in Pictures' trilogy, which will be launched in conjunction with the Fry's 'Ravilious in Essex' show (starts 24 April). The book focuses on watercolours painted in Essex, plus the odd one from Suffolk, and, through them, explores the artist's life in the north-west of the county.

As he did in the Sussex Downs, Ravilious found extraordinary subjects in everyday Essex. He had an eye for the archaic and the picturesque, from flour mills to steam engines; the world he conjured resembles the Edwardian 'Essex' John Betjeman found in a picture book and wrote about:

“The vagrant visitor erstwhile,”
My colour-plate book says to me,
“Could wend by hedgerow-side and stile,
From Benfleet down to Leigh-on-Sea.”

And as I turn the colour-plates
Edwardian Essex opens wide,
Mirrored in ponds and seen through gates,
Sweet uneventful countryside.

Like streams the little by-roads run
Through oats and barley round a hill
To where blue willows catch the sun
By some white weather-boarded mill.

We travel to the coast and back to the region close to London, then to the county Ravilious knew:

The deepest Essex few explore
Where steepest thatch is sunk in flowers
And out of elm and sycamore
Rise flinty fifteenth-century towers.

I see the little branch line go
By white farms roofed in red and brown,
The old Great Eastern winding slow
To some forgotten country town.

St James St, Castle Hedingham - note blue plaque marking Bank House

I can't believe that Betjeman and Ravilious never met, although I don't recall Rav mentioning an encounter in his letters. Both men were fascinated by the peculiarities of place but, whereas Betjeman's 'Collected Poems' includes an index of places, Ravilious generally leaves us to work out his locations for ourselves. Happily we've established where most of his Essex watercolours were painted, and identified a number of people shown in the paintings too. Better still, almost all of the paintings will be on show at the Fry, so you'll be able to see them for yourself...

Towner Talk: Familiar Visions

Robin Ravilious and I will be giving a talk at the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, at noon on Saturday 3rd July 2010, to celebrate the opening of Familiar Visions. This summer-long show is the first to feature work by Eric Ravilious and his son James Ravilious side by side, and it promises to be a treat. As far as I know there will be around eighty of James's photos and a couple of dozen watercolours by Eric, along with wood engravings and displays of tools and equipment.



My talk is on Eric Ravilious and the Sussex Downs, and my aim is to take people behind the scenes of several well-known paintings and to introduce characters and stories that I hope will add an extra dimension to the pictures. I have a powerpoint show with lots of photographs, sketches and other images that I hope people will enjoy.



Robin will be talking through a slide show of her late husband's fascinating, beautiful photographs that form a wonderful record of rural life in north Devon in the latter part of the 20th century.



It should be fun. The show runs until September, so if you can't make that weekend, there's plenty of time to get to Eastbourne...

FFI: Towner Gallery

Ravilious at the Towner

At Easter Alan and I gave a talk on the book to the Friends of the Towner Art Gallery, in Eastbourne. Frances Lloyd had this to say in the Towner Times, Aug 09 edition:

WITH TOWNER HOUSING the largest collection of his work in the world and the fact that he was an Eastbourne man, Eric Ravilious is always popular. He proved a big draw when the Friends recently welcomed writer and historian, James Russell to the Gold Room in the Winter Garden to share his knowledge about the shops featured in Ravilious’ seminal book, High Street.

The book, published 70 years ago, featured lithographs of 24 high street shops of the late 1930s and James Russell has been on a quest to identify and locate the shops – all real places but, in many cases, offering only tantalising clues as to their name or location. Only 2000 copies of the book were printed and what is left of remaining copies are much sought after, particularly as the lithographic plates were destroyed during the Blitz. Now, the Mainstone Press of Norwich has published a new limited edition entitled The Story of High Street, which reveals James Russell’s findings.

Lecturer and authority on Ravilious, Dr Alan Powers placed the book in historical context, sharing new and significant insights into its conception, production and publication. Two other experts, Christopher Whittick – the Ravilious archivist at East Sussex Record Office – and Tim Mainstone of Mainstone Press, also made contributions to this engrossing evening.