I've been a History Girl since the very beginning and I've never landed on a really iconic date. That is about to change - I'm posting on November 5th!
History Girls before me have pretty much covered the whole subject. You can read previous posts here, including my post on Lewes Bonfire in 2014. I confess to cheating a bit on that one because my posting date was 18th of the month but Lewes Bonfire was such a spectacle, I had to write about it.
I was looking around, quite literally, for inspiration and found it on my kitchen wall. I have a Ravilious calendar and the illustration for this month is his painting November 5th. Painted in 1933, it is the view from the Kensington flat he shared with his wife, Tirzah.
November 5th, Eric Ravilious, 1933
This painting immediately took me back to the garden of my parents' semi detached house in 1950's Solihull. After Christmas and my birthday, Bonfire Night, or Firework Night (the terms were interchangeable - we never called it Guy Fawkes Night) was the most important event in my calendar. Without in any way realising it, I was following the ancient festivals of the year's turning: my birthday is a few days before Midsummer, Bonfire Night is the Fire Festival that marks the start of winter and Christmas is the Winter Solstice. In those days, children seemed closer to the Old Ways. We played out all the time and were very attuned to the seasons. I would be looking forward to Bonfire Night as soon as summer was over. My friends and I would be making preparations from the beginning of September, buying fireworks as soon as they appeared in the shops. My favourite brand was Brock's.
My favourite fireworks were Bangers, Roman Candles, Mount Vesuvius Cones and Rockets. My brother's favourites were anything that made a very loud bang. I wasn't so keen on those, neither was the dog, but my brother was older than me and had more money, so he could afford Big Bangs. No-one liked Catherine Wheels, they were hard to light and fell off the fence. I also liked Sparklers and the strange and rather pointless Bengal Matches, does anyone remember them?
We would spend September and October collecting wood for the bonfire that my father built in the back garden. Adults would join in with this and donate any old wood that was lying about and any cuttings, clippings, pruning from the garden or the allotment. We would also collect clothes to make the Guy. An old pair of trousers and a jumper my mum stitched together and filled with newspaper, a stuffed stocking head and face and an old hat (it had to have a hat).
The bonfire would be constructed in the back garden, the guy perched on top. Dad would light the fire and when it was going well, all the conkers we'd collected through the Autumn would be thrown on to pop and crackle. It was a neighbourhood affair and everyone would be there. The dads let off the fireworks, we weren't allowed near them and we would wave sparklers. Last to be lit were the rockets and then we would have the sausages, baked potatoes and gingerbread that my mum had made. All over for another year. Well, not quite. We would spend the next day combing the streets for spent rockets, for some reason the sticks were highly prized.
This year, I'll be staying in but I might make my mum's gingerbread, very dark and sticky with molasses, for old time's sake.
Eric Ravilious - The Greenhouse:Cyclemen and Tomatoes
This beautifully curated exhibition at Compton Verney Museum and Art Gallery chronicles the collaborations and significant relationships, personal and professional, between Eric Ravilious (1903 – 1942) and various other artist-designers: friends, mentors, wives, lovers. The group included Paul Nash, John Nash, Enid Marx, Barnett Freedman, Eileen ‘Tirzah’ Garwood, Thomas Hennell, Douglas Percy Bliss, Peggy Angus, Helen Binyon, Diana Low and Edward Bawden. Many of them were at the Royal College of Art in the 1920s, a group of exceptional students that Paul Nash termed 'an outbreak of talent'. It's good to see the work of so many women artists exhibited here and given equal space to their male compatriots.The exhibition brings together nearly 500 works (many rarely shown). The paintings, prints, drawings, engravings, books, ceramics, wallpapers, and textiles highlight significant moments in the artists’ lives and work and also demonstrate the deep influence this group of artists had on British Art and their profound impact on Art and Design in the 1930s and 1940s and beyond. A previous exhibition at Compton VerneyBritain in the Fifties - Design and Aspiration served to demonstrate just how pervasive their influence was.
Enid Marx moquette design for London Underground
Eric Ravilious - Wedgwood Pottery Mug
Ravilious and his friends, with their teacher and mentor John Nash, believed that an artist could turn his or her hand to anything and their mission was to bring Art out of the Fine Art Gallery and into the lives of ordinary people through applied design. Quite apart from this lofty ambition, an artist had to earn a living. It made sense, therefore, to seek design work from various sources. The group were very successful. Their patterning, pastel colours and precision of line, their distinctive style of wood and copper engraving and lithography evoke a particular time so exactly that it has become that time. For us, it is the essence of nostalgia but in the 1930s and 40s, it was cutting edge modern. Their influence extended well into the 1950s and 1960s. Through applied design, their work became all pervasive, even ubiquitous. It could be seen at railway and tube stations, on advertising hoardings and film posters, the walls of people's homes, the fabrics they wore, the furniture they sat on, the plates they ate from, the magazines and books that they read as they travelled, even the seating of their underground train.
Eric Ravilious - Child's Handkerchief
Wisden - Eric Ravilous
Eric Ravilious - The Windstorm 1931
Enid Marx - paper design
Everyman Books - Ravilious cover design
Edward Bawden - book cover
Their work is particularly powerfully present in book design. The Bookshop installation in the exhibition demonstrates the wide and far reaching influence these artists had on book production. Their hand can be seen everywhere: in covers and cover design, bookplates, endpapers, lettering, bordering and illustrations. Instantly recognisable, even if we cannot name the artist, and fiercely nostalgic. As my writer friend and companion Linda Newbery pointed out, we grew up with them. Art work so timeless and unequalled that it is still being used today.
Edward Bawden - Film Poster
It is impossible to do justice to such a wide-ranging and comprehensive exhibition here. These artists concerned themselves with far more than art and design. They were committed to enhancing the lives of ordinary working people, bringing beauty and culture to them, rather than confining it to an art gallery. Many of the artists contributed original lithographs to the School Prints, a scheme designed to bring art into every classroom in the country and a whole section of the exhibition is devoted to the Morley Murals created by Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden to adorn the walls of the canteen of Waterloo's Morley College for Working Men and Women. Sadly, their work was lost during the war. A grainy, black and white film and their sketches and drawings show us what a loss that was.
The emphasis is not just on design, there are plenty of paintings on display. Principally those of Ravilious and Bawden, perhaps the best known of the group, but also their friends and associates. The paintings of Eric Ravilious are distinctive and hugely evocative. One can almost smell the tomatoes in The Greenhouse:Cyclemen and Tomatoes, the painting on the poster for the exhibition. Through his unique painting style, his use of pattern, texture, his palette of muted greens, greys and browns he made the landscape of Sussex, 'his own country', as particular and individual as Suerat's Paris or Van Gogh's Provence. To us, his paintings seem nostalgic, pastoral records of a lost rural past. But this is deceptive. This is no rural idyll. A Steam train puffs through the timeless landscape of the Downs. The same view is seen from the interior of a railway carriage, perhaps in the same train that is steaming past.
Eric Ravilious - Westbury Horse
Eric Ravilious - Train Landscape
A roller stands in the foreground of the cold, stark beauty of a winter landscape. A reminder that an agricultural labourer would be working in that cold all day.
Eric Ravilious - Downs in Winter
Eric Ravilious Hurricane in Flight
Eric Ravilious - Drift Boat
The Second World War cut across all their lives. Like their mentors, the Nash brothers, Ravilious and Bawden became War Artists. The patchwork of the British countryside was now viewed from the inside of a plane. A south coast beach is covered in snarls of barbed wire, the sea cut off from the land by coastal defences. Eric Ravilious was assigned to the Admiralty. In 1940 he was posted to Norway and swapped his muted greens and browns for the blues, whites, greys and black of the Arctic seas.
H.M.S. Glorious
In 1942, he requested a transfer to the RAF. On 28 August he flew to Iceland to join a base outside Reykjavik. The day he arrived a Hudson aircraft had failed to return from a patrol. The next morning, three planes were despatched to search for the missing plane. Ravilious opted to join one of the crews. His plane failed to return. The log book recording him as missing is on display here, his name poignantly mis-spelt. Four days later he was declared lost in action. One of the brightest talents in British Art had disappeared into the sea.
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.
