Eric Ravilious 1903-1942

ERIC RAVILIOUS 1903-1942

Biographical notes

Ravilious began his career as a muralist, not becoming known as an artist until 1924, and going on to become one of the best known of the 1930s. He also worked as a lithographer and printer.

He was especially inspired by the landscape of the South Downs and their chalk figures, and his stippled watercolours are prized for their otherworldly quality.

His woodcut of two gentlemen cricketers has appeared on the cover of every Wisden Cricketer’s Almanack since 1938, and he also designed for Wedgewood and London Transport, among others.

In the war years he became an official war artist which was ultimately the cause of his death while accompanying an RAF air-sea rescue mission off Iceland.

His work

Having searched for a variety of Ravilious’ work on the internet, I realised I was not familiar with any of it, although the style echoed other work of the 30s and 40s especially where designed for printing, as in book-jacket illustrations and transport posters.

The wood cuts I looked at are on the whole intended for bookplates or vignettes and have a rather stilted feeling to them, although it was interesting to see how he used line width and cross-hatching to develop tone, remembering of course that each carved line becomes a highlight when the print is taken.

His style irrespective of medium tends to be somewhat graphic. No doubt his experience in the print industry influenced the use of line and shape, as there is often a strong design element in the composition of his landscapes, and I am reminded of Susan William-Ellis’ “Tudwal Lighthouse” reworked to become the cover illustration for “Portraits of Islands” in 1953. (Magic Gardens, Portmerion Ltd 2008, p24-5)

My initial impression of his Downs landscapes was of strong verticals and horizontals balanced by sinuous curves. Colours tend to be muted and of limited hues with occasional accent colours.

These sinuous curves sometimes appear not quite “right”, which reinforces the perception of his work as otherworldly. It is particularly well used on two of his landscapes with chalk figures.

Some of his wartime images, particularly of planes and submarines, show strong graphically abstract elements where the shape of a wing or partial hull is pinned to the edge of the picture plane in an interesting precursor of Roger Hilton’s work from the early 1950s.

His The Greenhouse: cyclamen and tomatoes (1935) with its numinous upward arrow of light describing the receding space, could at first glance be the prototype shape for Gormley’s “Angel of the North”, and the quality of light achieved in this picture is similar to Naum Gabo’s ambitions when he worked on his Perspex spacial sculptures in 1938-40.

It was interesting to find studies which were later used for final works as it allowed a glimpse of his workflow. Using pencil first, colour is then layered up, often with watercolour and at other times cross-hatching with pastel and crayon.  From the Isle of May looking to the Forth Bridge (c1940-1) (scroll down for verso image) shows how colours were developed in layers of carefully applied strokes to accentuate the wake of the boat and movement of water.

The work which most stood out for me was Submarines in Dry Dock (1940)  which uses pencil, watercolour, crayon and pastel and most strongly shows the effects possible with linear media in describing the textures on the scaffolding and the shapes of the submarines. The submarine studies appear in an earlier montage piece but are here grounded among a cradle of scaffolding. Once again there is one element which is slightly “wrong”- in this case the top profile of the right hand sub, which curves down despite being above eye-level. One wonders whether Ravilious used this deliberately in order to accentuate the somewhat alien shape to his audience.