LANDSCAPES AND LOOKING: Reflections on Eric & James Ravilious. by Penny Dolan

This week, I am sorting through the too-many books here at home. I am culling some, and collecting others into “families”: shelves of books inspired by the same theme.
 
One bookcase is now home to a family of books about aspects of the English landscape, from Alison Utley’s A Country Childhood through to Oliver Rackham’s books about trees to George Ewart Evans Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay and more. Some we bought and some were given as gifts. Others, often the hardest to discard, were inherited.
 
Standing within the waves of scattered volumes, I start wondering what other titles should join this family: those by Robert Macfarlane, perhaps, or Roger Deakin? Or large-format books about landscape art or painting or photography? Where does the family of "landscape" end?

All at once I remember landscapes by a favourite artist: Eric Ravilious, painter, wood-engraver and designer. I went to the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s retrospective Ravilious exhibition in 2015, and in the video below you can see James Russell, the curator, talking about Ravilious and his pictures and the “scratch” technique that gives the artists pieces such luminosity.

Entry was for strictly limited periods but, once inside, I avoided the exit. I wove my way up and back though the exhibition, living with the Ravilious paintings throughout a wonderful afternoon. His work seems full of rolling downs, of chalk cliffs overlooking the sea and of lanes winding through peaceful fields: an essentially English rural landscape. 

For some time, Eric Ravilious and Tirzah Garwood (also an artist and wood engraver) were part of an influential group of figurative artists living around Great Bardfield in Essex, although the landscapes of the South Downs dominate many of his most popular images.

In 1939, Eric Ravilious signed up as a war artist with the Royal Marines, moving from one posting to another. He painted on land and from the moving decks of warships, watching the planes overhead. Ravilious brought the same sense of enigmatic light to all these harsher subjects: the airfields, the waiting planes and broken machinery, the men walking across wet sand to defuse a beached mine. 

He learned to fly and was sent to Iceland. On the first day of September 1942, he joined one of three planes sent out to search for a lost aircraft. Ravilious’s aircraft never returned and, four days later, he and the crew were reported lost at sea.

I am often intrigued by how the making of art can run in families, both through what could be called the genes and also through the family culture: those families where the possibility of making art is acknowledged and celebrated. So, very recently, hearing the same surname again, I was immediately interested.  

This “new” name was James Ravilious, Eric’s middle child. Born in 1939, James's only memory of Eric was running down the lane to hug his father as he left for war, and being given a threepenny coin from father's coat pocket. Sadly, after Eric's death, Tirzah’s already poor health worsened. She died, leaving her children orphans. James was only eleven. Growing up, he studied at St Martin’s School of Art, and afterwards taught painting and drawing in London. He fell in love and married a kindred spirit, Robin, in 1970. She was the daughter of the glass engraver and poet Laurence Whistler, and she also shared a sorrowful childhood.

During 1972, James and Robin left London for the countryside, and around that same time, James abandoned drawing and painting and took up photography. They settled by the village of Beaford, in what was then a largely unspoilt area of North Devon. James started taking photographs to record the landscape, the seasons, community, customs and people, but what began as a short project grew into a seventeen-year archive covering the changing rural life of the area. James added to it as well, copying earlier photographs of the same area. All the collected images now form the Beaford historical archive, whose images have been exhibited around the world.

Whether James’ talent was inherited though the genes, or learned through the artistic culture of his parents and family friends, one thing stands out for me. James Ravilious’s black and white photographs seem to share the same quality of quiet observation and love of the light visible in his father’s work. They both seem filled with a quiet but real passion for the English landscape.

James Ravilious died too, in 1999, but his wife Robin has published an account of his life in 2017.  Here, also is a clip about an influential film that James Ravilious made about photography:

So how does this post link with History Girls and writing? 
James Ravilious met the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and was very influenced by him, adopting Cartier-Bresson's approach in his own photography, even down to using the same model of camera, a LeicaM3. James followed Cartier Bresson’s approach, including the rule about never posing a subject or cropping an image, so his subjects display a natural grace.

Additionally, James also took to heart Cartier-Bresson’s most fervent mantra:

There is such a thing as The Moment. 
It is mysterious, but if you look at several shots of the one scene, 
there is one that has it – as if there were a little poem there.

Today, revising a piece of fiction, I paused and pondered about this concept of that one essential mysterious “Moment”. Although painting and photography are visual art forms, I think that writers, too, try to choose that one specific “Moment”, try to write the one specific, telling scene, try to capture that one perfectly imagined visualisation in the hope that the magic (and poetry) will make the words live?

Oh, and then the scene after? And then the scene after that . . .?

I’m going back to sorting out my book families: it’s easier than art.

Penny Dolan

ps. A travelling exhibition, “Ravilious and Co”, about Eric and his contemporaries opens at Compton Verney Gallery, Warwickshire, in March 2018.

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A VISION OF THE ARTIST AT WORK by Penny Dolan

Imagine.

The ancient abbey is vast and, in later centuries, will be crowded with ornate memorials. Nevertheless, now – in London, in 1771 – a few historic effigies and tombs can be seen in the shadowy aisles, their carvings worn and their paint faded.  

The newly-reformed Society of Antiquaries is eager to have a record of these treasures for surely their own nation’s history is now as worthy of study as the classical world? 


A series of careful engravings are required, and that is why the boy sits in the hallowed gloom, pencil in hand, drawing the long dead. His master, James Basire, the foremost architectural line engraver in London, has chosen this fourteen year old apprentice specifically for this stage of the commission.  
 
First of all, the boy has been copying casts of classical statues since he was ten. He has the ability to draw a good foot, a hand, a torso, a head, a detail and more. Secondly – and maybe this is just as important a reason – Master Basire knows the boy has a passionate, argumentative nature and that he is easiest when left to work alone. Certainly, the lad’s brain seems fit to burst with his tales of biblical visions and lines from scripture and Milton’s poetry. 
 

 

Time passes. The boy works. The tall windows let in little daylight so he lights a candle stub or two. The small flames make the tombs look like great four-poster beds: the stone slabs in place of soft mattresses and the hard, carved canopy instead of curtains overhead.

His task, in drawing each tomb, is to demonstrate it from every angle and produce a record of every important detail and inscription. 

Down below, under the fine stonework, he knows the bodies are waiting. Once or twice, where stones have been cracked and shifted, he spied bones and breathed dust from the darkness within.Now he raises his head and stares. 
Up there, high up on their stony beds, the strange elongated effigies of old kings and queens face upwards, heavenwards, God-wards. The royal features are not for common, everyday eyes to view - and yet the Society has asked for a true record of all that is there, have they not?

Fortunately, the boy is determined, as well as small for his fourteen years. When the abbey is quiet, he climbs right up on to the tombs and stands there, just below the carved canopies. Leaning forward, he draws the human figures at his feet, reaching out to measure the features as he does so. Some of the tombs are so low that he is forced to kneel or crouch almost nose to nose with the cold, dead faces. He does not mind: his imagination feeds on these moments. 

He works. Now and then, he hears voices echo in the sacred air and once ghostly monks passed in a procession. He does not mind. Such spectres are better than the flesh-and-blood schoolboys who visit the abbey, mocking him and his work. He glances down at his marked knuckles, his eyes still alight with righteous anger. Master Basire was correct about that temper.

Imagine the boy, working. Imagine what patterns this particular work must be forming in his mind. 

All his youthful energies are bound up with the spirits of this place: the sense of history, of worldly and godly glory, of living words cut into stone, of the eternal victory of death - and of his own dreams, eagerly calling him on to great things. All he sees, hears and feels while working alone in that place will go into his own work. He pauses, stretches his shoulders, bends over and draws again.

The building is Westminster Abbey.

The boy? His name is William Blake.

As I began reading Peter Ackroyd’s excellent biography of Blake, I came across his account of this stage in the boy’s apprenticeship and, startled by the scene conjured up, used it as a starting point for my own writing, above.

Adolescent experiences can be intense enough to imprint perceptions that persist long afterwards - especially if you are an imaginative young apprentice working twelve hours a day, six days a week, and with a head constantly spinning with new thoughts and half-biblical visions.

Reading about Blake standing on the tombs, I felt as if a half-recognised aspect of Blake’s work had suddenly become understandable. 

There is, of course, the strongly sculptural nature of many of his figures, but I also wondered – and this is only my thought which you can take or leave – whether the young artist, leaning over the effigies on the tombs, had so absorbed the physical and bodily memory of that encounter that he recreated that stance over and over again in the form and shape of his paintings and artwork.

Is this idea possible? Did the familiar "Blake" shape of the bending deity or spirit, leaning over the human come from something remembered in his own body? What do you think?

Meanwhile, I must see more and read more of Ackroyd’s William Blake - and maybe more elsewhere, including Blake’s own account - and see what I discover.

 

Penny Dolan

'Intervene in the field of the imagination' by Lydia Syson

The idea that the Spanish Civil War was primarily a ‘poets’ war’, as Stephen Spender suggested, has often been questioned in the 75 years since it ended.  In terms of numbers, it was a workers’ war.  Now a remarkable exhibition and book explore for the first time the many different ways in which it was also an artists’ war.  In the process, Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War, powerfully demonstrates that this is because it was, in fact, everybody’s war. 

The juxtaposition of images in the first few pages of Simon Martin’s accompanying book makes this point particularly well. First there’s a semi-abstract Henry Moore lithograph of 1939 called ‘Spanish Prisoner’ - eyes, bars, barbed wire, monumental despair – which was imprisoned itself in Camberwell School of Art when WW2 broke out, so couldn’t be printed to raise funds for Spanish refugees in French detention camps as Moore intended.  Then this eye-catching and anonymous poster in yellow, red and purple with the simple plea: ‘Help Spain’. 

Courtesy of the People's History Museum

Turning the page, I was struck by a 1936 photograph by Edith Tudor-Hart of the ‘Aid for Spain’ fundraiding shop in my own London Borough, Southwark, an image which documents the sheer scale of support for Republic Spain in Britain.  This shop was open till ten at night.  Its windows and door are plastered with exhortatory appeals: ‘Buy a tin of food! We will send it to Spain’, ‘Buy a milk token’, ‘Please step inside and see what Spain means to you’, and, in largest letters of all, ‘SPAIN IS FIGHTING FOR YOU’.

‘Unless he is prepared to see all thought pressed into one reactionary mould, by tyrannical dictatorships – to see the beginning of another set of dark ages – the artist is left with no choice but to help in the fight for the real establishment of Democracy against the menace of Dictatorships,’ wrote Moore, expressing the commitment of a generation.

Picasso’s Guernica, painted in the wake of the bombing of the Basque town in April 1937, has undoubtedly overshadowed the efforts of every other artist in this respect, including his own magnificent Weeping Woman, a highlight of this exhibition. But instead of attempting the impossible – unearthing British works of art to compete with Picasso’s – Conscience and Conflict takes a better path.  Both book and exhibition tell an exceptionally moving story of the vast, varied and often collective response both to events in Spain and to the arrival of the painting Guernica in Britain - it was seen by 3,000 people in the New Burlington Galleries and over 15,000 in Whitechapel. One of many sub-plots to this narrative is the democratising effect Spain had on British art in the 1930s.  

 

Artistic engagement in this war took multiple forms.  Some turned their talents to propaganda images, making banners, hoardings, cartoons, book covers, posters.  Others sold their work to raise money and awareness, largely through the Artists International Association, whose history is particularly well told, and later the Spanish Artists Refugee Committee.  And like writers, artists took sides, in similar proportions. Pro-Francoist and more ambivalent artists are represented here too – works by Edward Burra and Wyndham Lewis stand out.

Edward Burra, The Watcher, c. 1937,
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art,
© Estate of the Artist, c/o Lefevre Fine Art, London

A few British artists chose to go to Spain to fight for the cause. Felicia Browne was the only British woman in combat, and the first British volunteer to die in battle. Her sketchbook, though not her body, was recovered and her work exhibited soon after her death to raise funds for the war effort.  I’ve never seen any work by sculptor Jason Gurney, whose posthumously published memoir Crusade in Spain was a very valuable source for A World Between Us: Gurney was wounded in the hand, and apparently unable to sculpt again.  Clive Branson returned, but only after imprisonment in the notorious Francoist camp of San Pedro de Cardeñ.  Branson’s colourful, realist paintings are well represented in this show, along with sketches he made in Spain of fellow prisoners. I thought of these when I was writing the Ebro scenes in my novel: Nat determines to take his drawings of his dead friend Bernie back to his wife in Mile End if he survives the battle. Branson was killed in action in Burma in 1944, where a disporportionate number of Communists and former International Brigaders seem to have been sent during World War Two. (My grandfather, a friend and comrade of Branson’s, broke his arm very badly in a training exercise the night before he was due to fly there himself, which probably saved his life.)

A photograph in the book from the International Brigade Archive at the Marx Memorial Library shows artist-turned-ambulance-driver Wogan Philips standing in front of the vehicle which inspired the opening of my chapter 10:

‘Felix stood on the dusty road, rereading the writing on the front of the ambulance and wishing she didn’t have to get back into it quite so soon.  She rolled the words round her tongue.

‘Medicamentos para los obreros de España.’

The letters were hand painted in white capitals, bold against dark green paintwork.  They got bigger and bigger until they reached the huge final ‘A’ of España. . .This was what she’d undertaken.  Medicine for the workers of Spain.’

Walter Nessler, Premonition, 1937
Courtesy of the Trustees of the Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon

Looking at Walter Nessler’s dark oil painting of London contorted by bombing, painted three years before the Blitz, I thought of Felix's letter home, defending her departure:

'We’re all involved.  We can’t let the Blackshirts win in England, and we can’t let the Nationalists force their way into power here either.  It’s a fight for the only things really worth fighting for – everything I always used to take for granted, I suppose…like freedom, and elections, and being able to say what you think.  I can’t just close my eyes and pretend it’s not happning.  Fighting here is the only thing we can do right now to stop Fascist bombers flying over Lawrie Park Road next year, or the year after.'

When I started writing A World Between Us, I hadn’t quite realised how heavily involved in the Aid Spain movement my grandparents and other relatives had been.  Soon familiar names cropped up everywhere I looked.  I discovered a portrait of my mother, aged four, by Edith Tudor-Hart, whose genius for photographing children can be seen in this exhibition in images of ‘los niños’ – the young Basque refugee children who came to Britain on the Habaña in 1937.  In her hands, a camera was a political weapon.  According to Tudor-Hart, photography had ‘ceased to be an instrument for recording events and became a means for influencing and stimulating events.’ I have another picture of my mother by Ramsey and Muspratt, who took the extraordinary picture of John Cornford (with Ray Peters), also in Conscience and Conflict, that led so many to describe him as the ‘poster-boy’ of the International Brigades.

For obvious reasons, I loved the posters in this exhibition, many of which I knew already, but even more I loved the surprises: the terrifying Neville Chamberlain mask worn by Roland Penrose and others at the May Day procession to Hyde Park in 1938, and a papier-mâché horse's head from the Surrealist float; the haunting ruins and empty streets painted by John Armstrong (see book cover), who went on to become an official war artist  – scraps of paper blowing in the wind mimic human beings swept from their homes by war.  Perhaps most startling of all is the astonishing series of pictures of refugees on the road by Ursula McCannell, which she started painting when she was only thirteen.  As the Daily Mail pronounced after her first solo show, they ‘seem to typify all suffering in Spain.’ 

Ursula McCannell (b. 1923)
Family of Beggars, 1939,
Marcus Rees Roberts

Conscience and Conflict, a Pallant House Gallery exhibition which ran in Chichester from 8 November 2014 to 15 February 2015, opens tomorrow at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle and runs until 7 June 2015.  Simon Martin’s book, published by Pallant House Gallery in association with Lund Humphries, is equally strongly recommended.

Lydia Syson's Liberty's Fire will be published on May 7th.  From October 2015, she will be an RLF Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art.