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| Photo of 'Ravilious: Submarine' at the Bristol City Docks by Dru Marland |
There's more information on the book below and here.
There's more information on the book below and here.
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Win 'Ravilious: Submarine'!
There's more information on the book below and here.
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Wanted: Good Home for John Piper Mural
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| John Piper, An Englishman's Home (section), 1951 (Liss Fine Art) |
At the more humdrum end of the scale we have a mural at the end of our road in Bristol, a massive picture of a balloon floating over the landscape; it's painted on the side of a pub overlooking a green and, like murals everywhere, it is gradually fading. The Twentieth Century Society is currently campaigning to preserve what it can of the thousand-plus murals painted in the decades after World War Two.
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| An Englishman's Home fills one wall of the gallery at 22 Old Bond St |
There are dramatic pieces by Peter Lanyon, Edward Bawden, Barbara Jones and Alan Sorrell, but the mural that really steals the show is John Piper's epic architectural painting, 'An Englishman's Home'. As you can see from my rather poor photos, this is a fabulously huge picture, painted in oils on 42 panels. Exhibited in 1951 it subsequently languished in an Essex barn for years before being displayed for the Festival of Britain anniversary in 2011.
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| Right hand end with Brighton-Aquatints-style rooftops, chair included for scale |
Why has nobody come running, chequebook in hand? And how, if no major institution gets behind modern British murals, are the rest of us to be persuaded that it's worth preserving those pictures that still adorn the walls of schools, hospitals, restaurants and village halls around the country?
FFI: Fine Art Society
Twentieth Century Society
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A Lost Ravilious Mural
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| Eric Ravilious, Life in a Boarding House, from 'Ravilious: Submarine' |
The college, which had been founded in the previous century, had close links with the the Old Vic Theatre, so the murals had for the most part a theatrical theme. Bawden painted scenes from 'King Lear', 'The Tempest', 'As You Like It' and 'Romeo and Juliet', while Ravilious contributed scenes from Marlowe's 'Tragedy of Dr Faustus', with the Seven Sins floating down from the beams. There were pictures from Miracle Plays and obscure Elizabethan drama, interspersed with figures and symbols: a quartet of winds, a group of Harlequin figures and so on. His chief model was his former student, soon-to-be wife and future collaborator, Tirzah Garwood.
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| Ravilious and Bawden pose for the cameras |
Morley College is still going strong more than 80 years later, but the murals were destroyed when the refectory was hit by a bomb during the Blitz. Bawden subsequently returned to paint a new set of pictures, and these can be seen today.
'Life in a Boarding House' is one of many rare and unusual images featured in 'Ravilious: Submarine', published by The Mainstone Press.
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Three Dates for April
By a strange quirk of planning I'm doing talks on three consecutive Thursdays next month, each one rather different from the rest.
I'm delighted to be speaking at Bankside Gallery in London on April 11, at the invitation of the Royal Watercolour Society, on the subject of Eric Ravilious: Travelling Artist. This is the theme of the fourth book in the Ravilious in Pictures series (which was supposed to be a trilogy) and it's great fun to talk about. Rav was a talented letter writer with a wonderful sense of humour, so there's plenty of opportunity to go behind the scenes of his pictures and find out what he was up to, and with whom.
This talk has SOLD OUT, so apologies if you've missed out this time.
All change the following week, when (on April 18) I'm travelling to Chichester to give a talk on Paul Nash at the Pallant House Gallery. I'm excited about this one too, partly because Pallant is such a fabulous institutions and partly because my lecture coincides with an exhibition of Paul Nash prints, photographs, collage and books from a collection that once belonged to his great patron and friend Clare Neilson. It sounds as though there's some fabulous stuff in the collection, which was donated by Clare's godson Jeremy Greenwood and Alan Swerdlow, through the Art Fund, and I'm looking forward to seeing it.
My talk will be based on 'Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream', but will focus particularly on Nash's long friendship with Clare Neilson.
It's back to Ravilious, then, for the final leg, and for me an opportunity to talk about my new book, 'Ravilious: Submarine', at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich (free, but you need to book). I wanted to do this partly because NMM staff were so helpful when we were putting the book together, plus I used to live in Greenwich and walk past the Museum every day, so there's a bit of nostalgia involved! I'll be talking about both the making of the Submarine Series and about life aboard a Royal Navy submarine during World War II, so it should be fun.
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An Outbreak of Talent at the Fry Art Gallery
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| Edward Bawden, Costume Design for The Tempest, 1933, Fry Art Gallery |
It is true that interwar British art was for the most part a modest business, unsurprisingly perhaps given the economic vagaries of the time. Artists painted the artwork for posters or beavered away in other areas of industrial design. They produced murals (now mostly vanished) and wood engravings (now mostly hidden in old books and obscure archives) and worked in the under-appreciated medium of watercolour.
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| Edward Burra, Hop Pickers Who Have Lost Their Mothers, 1924, Fry Art Gallery |
One British artist who won international respect - Magritte named him 'master of the object' - was Paul Nash, and his influence on the period, and on British art more generally, is highlighted in an exhibition that opens at the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden this weekend.
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| Paul Nash, Poster for British Industries Fair, 1935, London Transport Museum |
Ten years ago I was teaching at the Royal College of Art. I was fortunate in being there during an outbreak of talent, and can remember at least eight men and women who have made names for themselves since then in a variety of different directions; in Painting, Edward Burra; Applied Design, Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman, and Eric Ravilious; Textiles, Enid Marx; Pottery, Bradon (sic), also William Chappel in Stage Design and Barbara Ker-Seymer in Photography.
Why he failed to 'remember' the two biggest stars of the RCA firmament, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, is unclear, but it may have had something to do with the battle then raging between abstract and non-abstract artists. Ravilious and co. were very much in awe of the Yorkshire contingent, whose table in the RCA refectory was - to use an expression from another time and place - where it was at.
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| Edward Bawden, The Three Graces, 1928, Fry Art Gallery |
Knowing the Fry, you can expect some lovely things by Bawden and Ravilious in particular, but I'm hoping to see work by Barnett Freedman and Enid Marx, two excellent artists we should know better. As for Nash himself, I'm always on the look-out for pictures I haven't seen before. He could turn a shopping list into a thing of mystery and elegance. As far as I'm concerned, he was the grand-daddy of the YBAs, an artist way ahead of his time. But that's another story...
FFI: Fry Art Gallery - NB always check opening times before travelling!
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Can Modern Art Still Be Fun?
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| Yves Klein in flight |
After a while, though, I became jaded. Perhaps I was overdoing it, but the main problem was that every museum seemed to feature the same artists. As I walked around ticking off the Names I started to suspect that the Modern Art museums of the world were like a chain of stores, offering artworks selected from a canon established by influential critics. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, unless you visit too many museums one after another. You wouldn't visit seven Tescos in search of new experiences, would you?
What made me feel rather gloomier was my gradual loss of interest in artists I had admired for their crazy behaviour, brilliance and humour. One of my treasured possessions at the time was a poster showing Yves Klein apparently leaping out of a window, yet I felt little of that madcap spirit on my travels; the real artistry lay in the making of the work, perhaps, rather than the work itself - what we were left to enjoy were the mementos of other people's adventures.
With this thought in mind I went with some trepidation to the Barbican on Friday to see the show about Duchamp, Cage, Cunningham, Johns & Rauschenberg. That I went at all was mostly because of a video clip posted by critic Fisun Guner of John Cage performing one of his crazy pieces of music on a game show. That little clip brought back the excitement of discovering Modern Art as a provincial teenager. Back in the 1980s it seemed that everything wonderful happened elsewhere, in Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin or New York, and art was a kind of distillation of all that glamour and invention. The artists themselves were heroic in their determination to challenge the tedium of everyday life with giant hamburgers, cartoon figures, images of celebrity and disaster. Modern Art was cool and fun.
The day before the Barbican visit I popped into Tate Modern, and the only thing about the place that was cool or fun was the cafe at the top. Admittedly I didn't go to the Lichenstein show, but I did visit a dozen or more rooms, each one more depressing than the last; there were a couple of brilliant pieces by Max Ernst and a lovely Delvaux painting, otherwise the best thing on show was a full-length portrait by Meredith Frampton. Perhaps this was because you could enjoy the picture without knowing anything about art history, whereas so much of the other stuff meant nothing outside its context.
But would the Barbican show offer more? I'd previously seen Duchamp's 'The Bride Laid Bare...' once or twice and found it frustratingly obscure. Now here it was again, still impossible to fathom despite the helpful chart describing its component parts. Am I missing something, or is the joke on us? I love R Mutt's 'Fountain' because its effect is immediate and funny (though slightly less so when presented in a box of centimetre-thick perspex), but 'The Bride Laid Bare' is one for the PhDs only.
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| Robert Rauschenberg, Express, 1963 (DACS/Artist's Estate) |
The same is true, I would have thought, for about half of the show. A reasonably intelligent visitor, I was defeated by the dry displays in the rooms devoted to music, maths and chance. The pianos playing themselves are a lot of fun, though, and so are many of the artworks: Duchamp's trompe l'oeil door, the lovely Johns piece with the painting-by-numbers target, paints and brush and the same artist's 'Field Painting' were particular treats. The latter features an illuminated letter and a light switch, and I'm sure many visitors have the urge to flick the switch and see what happens.
It says something about the gulf between the making of these works and our viewing of them that to do so would get you arrested.
I particularly wanted to rescue Rauschenberg's 'Music Box' from its perspex prison and give it a shake. A crude wooden box with rusty nails penetrating from the outside and pebbles inside, it is an object crying out to be picked up and played with. With all three of the visual artists you get the feeling that they had great fun making their work, and somehow - almost in spite of the exhibition's rationale - this energy came through.
With the pianos clunking and plinking away in the background and the spirit of these wonderfully inventive artists filling the gallery, I felt a definite quiver of excitement. There's still a lot of fun to be had exploring the avant-garde of the past, when it's presented with the kind of love and sensitivity shown by the Barbican show's curator, Phillipe Parreno. I bet the dancing is great too.
FFI: Barbican Art Gallery
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To Chichester by Choo-choo
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| RB Kitaj, The Rise of Fascism, 1979-80 (Tate/Artist's Estate) |
The train went via Bath and Bradford-on-Avon to Warminster, Salisbury and Southampton, crossing a region that roughly equates both to old Wessex and to Southern Command during World War II. Just beyond Warminster we passed an army depot with rows of heavily armoured, desert-brown vehicles, the austere hills of Salisbury Plain rising behind. We trundled along the Wylye Valley and through Wilton, where two artistically minded generals, Auchinleck and Alexander, held the post of Commander-in-Chief, Southern Command, one after another.
Their Camouflage Officer was Edward Seago, painter, inventor of a new concealment material made from horsehair and subsequently a life-long friend of both men. I wonder whether he was involved with the crazy scheme to camouflage chalk railway cuttings by spraying them with black ink, an experiment Eric Ravilious was invited to record but which was abandoned too soon for him to do so.
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| Paul Delvaux, A Siren in Full Moonlight, 1940 (Southampton City Art Gallery) |
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| Chichester Cathedral - peregrine falcons nest in top right turret |
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| 'What will survive of us is love' - The Arundel Tomb |
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| Graham Sutherland, Noli me Tangere, 1960 |
But the cathedral was an added bonus. My real reason for coming to Chichester was to talk about Paul Nash at Pallant House, a gallery that, like Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, champions 20th century British painting and sculpture. The main collection inhabits a characterful 18th century house with small, well-proportioned rooms that might have been designed to show the kind of art on display. A couple are currently filled with Barbara Hepworth's hospital drawings, but otherwise this is a treasure trove of pictures by neglected artists.
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| Pallant House |
Where else would you see a painting by Frances Hodgkins, the New Zealander who was one of Britain's best-known modern artists in the early 1940s? Where, outside Kettle's Yard, might you find pictures by Ben and Winifred Nicholson side by side, so that the similarity between the two is obvious? Christopher Wood is there too, and Alfred Wallis, and Ivon Hitchens, and the Nash brothers. At the end of my talk someone kindly pointed out to me that there was an Eileen Agar self-portrait in an upstairs room.
The main attraction just now is an RB Kitaj retrospective, which you can read all about here. I think I enjoyed most the more straightforward pastel drawings, which show both wonderful draughtsmanship and a disquieting sense of character and atmosphere.
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| Paul Nash, by Clare Neilson (Pallant) |
But I was there because of Paul Nash and his patron and friend Clare Neilson. Her collection of his books, letters and photographs was recently given to Pallant House, and is currently on display. If you're a Nash fan you have to see this. This isn't a curator or critic's interpretation of Nash's career but an intimate portrait of the artist; alongside wood engravings, illustrations and books - 'Places', 'Room and Book' and others - are hand-written letters and photos, stuck to pages from faded albums, showing him playfully posing with standing stones.
This is the artist I was looking for when I researched 'Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream', and it was a treat to see him brought to life in this beautifully presented exhibition.
FFI: Pallant House Gallery
FFI: Pallant House Gallery
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Mary Fedden and Julian Trevelyan: Greenside Arts Lecture
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David Inshaw, Roland Collins... & Picasso at the Courtauld
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| David Inshaw: Bonfire, Tree, Moon & Firework, 2012 |
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| The Fine Art Society, with Badminton Game and mink. |
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| 15 Paintings by David Inhaw, Fine Art Society (a bit dark, sorry) |
Meanwhile, in another part of the city... in fact just round the corner in Cork Street, Browse and Darby have an exhibition of work by Roland Collins, who at the age of 94 is enjoying a well-deserved popularity. After a sold-out show at Mascalls last year he has recently exhibited at the Rye Art Gallery, and now has this small but lovely London exhibition.
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| Roland Collins, Belgrave Mews |
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| Roland Collins, A Shore Off the Yacht Club, Whitstable |
If you have a friend who is interested in art history but intimidated by the vastness of most museums, the Courtauld is the perfect place to start. Starting at the bottom and working your way up through the three floors you see examples of work from diverse periods in European art, from the 14th century to the 20th. It's unusual to see such a carefully selected group of pictures covering such a wide time-frame, and fascinating to chart developments and influences.
It struck me that the figures in the current exhibition, Becoming Picasso: Paris 1901, have much in common with the very earliest pictures in the collection, being simplified and expressive. The overwhelming impression, though, was of the Spaniard's sheer energy; accompanying photos show the maniacal light in his eyes, while the paintings themselves are bursting with life. One day, I think, people will look at Picasso's more grotesque work and wonder what all the fuss was about, but in these youthful paintings his brilliance, emotional power and vitality is clear to see.
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| View of the Courtauld, with melancholy barmaid |
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Some Pictures of Submarines
Last week I gave a talk at the National Maritime Museum about 'Ravilious: Submarine', which was illustrated with various pictures borrowed from the Imperial War Museum's online collection. They have the most astonishing array of images, and I'm very grateful that they allow non-commercial use. Anyway, here are some of the photos...
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| Not fun: a trainee submariner learns how to use Davis Submarine Escape Apparatus at HMS Dolphin, Gosport |
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| New recruits arrive at HMS Dolphin, Gosport |
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| L-class submarines, HMS Dolphin |
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| Control Room, WWII submarine |
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| Submariners worked, ate and slept wherever they could - note hanging teacups |
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| The Ward Room - the officer in the middle is Peter Young, in peacetime Penguin's production manager |
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| Motor room, with engine room beyond |
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| The Commander of HMS Snapper hard at work |
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| Occasionally someone else had a go, in this case the Bishop of Liverpool |
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| Successes were recorded on the Jolly Roger carried by every sub - That's what happens when you label submariners 'pirates' as Admiral Arthur Wilson did early in the century... |
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Eric Ravilious: Chalk Paths
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| Eric Ravilious, Chalk Paths, 1935 (private collection) |
Between the wars the Downs became synonymous with freedom. Then, as now, the chalk hills fascinated people whose homes lay in lowland towns and cities, and they came in increasing numbers by rail, or by car, or by Green Line Coach from London, to experience the wide skies and breezes. As early as 1903 Edward Thomas had written enticingly of the Sussex Downs in The South Country, describing his escape from London by train to ‘this pure kingdom of grass and sky’. To Thomas, the chalk paths were filled with mystery and promise.
‘The long white roads are a temptation’, he wrote. ‘What quests they propose! They take us away to the thin air of the future or to the underworld of the past.
Eric Ravilious once remarked that he never knew the date at Furlongs, and he was not alone in relishing the freedom of life there. Here he conveys the airy, open quality of the landscape, and the lure of the white road, although this vision of freedom seems circumscribed by the taut black barbed-wire fence that separates us from the path. We may be unwise to look for a meaning in this fence, but its presence adds to the painting a certain quality of unease.
Subjects like this seemed plentiful in the country around Furlongs, a landscape that fascinated and inspired Ravilious like no other. Experiencing it, he told Peggy Angus, changed his whole outlook and his way of painting, ‘I think because the colour of the landscape was so lovely and the design so beautifully obvious.’
He got up early, often at dawn, and set off carrying his drawing board in a large brown canvas satchel made for him by Tirzah. A tall figure, with a brown round-brimmed hat pulled firmly down on his head, he would stride off across the Downs, stopping to work either standing, at a light sketching easel, or else seated with the board across his knees. Returning to Furlongs at midday, he ate mutton or eggs for lunch and rested for a while before going back to work more on the painting he had begun earlier; he had an uncanny ability to retain his intense first impression of a subject, however the light or weather might change.
Often, pressure of time or vagaries in the weather meant Ravilious had to finish drawings in his caravan-studio - or even back in Essex - from notes pencilled onto the paper. But this seemed if anything to enhance his vision, in which a topographer’s eye was combined with an uncanny sense of the visual possibilities in a landscape. The creative power of memory allowed him to get beyond geographical details and, as he does here, capture the spirit of a place.
This is an extract from my book 'Ravilious in Pictures: Sussex and the Downs', which is published by The Mainstone Press.
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Ravilious in Capel-y-Ffin
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| Eric Ravilious, Waterwheel (1938) |
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| Possibly painted here... |
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| More haybales than houses... Y-Twmpa (Lord Hereford's Knob) in the background |
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| Rav stayed here - there wasn't much competition |
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| St Marys Church, the approach from Hay-on-Wye |
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| Eric Ravilious, Wet Afternoon (1938) He wasn't quite so lucky with the weather. |
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| St Mary's Church |
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| The gravestones in the churchyard seem to have been hand-picked... |
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| Close-up of stone above |
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| Sometimes the lichen makes the lettering clearer |
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| The monastery, home in the 1920s to the Gill clan, including David Jones |
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| Baptist Chapel, with gravestones and Y-Twmpa... Capel seems to have more ecclesiastical buildings than houses, hence its name I suppose |
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| It's go go go in Capel-y-Ffin |
'Ravilious in Pictures: A Travelling Artist' is published by The Mainstone Press.
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The Big Apple at Blossomtime
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| Dark clouds above, cider within... |
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| In the heart of perry country, a much-loved village hall. |
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| Is it bigger on the inside? |
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| Thirsty? |
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| An ironing board put to good use for once... |
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| There's something about corrugated iron... |
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| Is that a scene from a David Inshaw painting in the background? |
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| Meanwhile, back at the Hall, the Leominster Morrismen enjoy the sunshine. |
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| Love the violinist's jacket... |
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| Pears for heirs - a lovely old perry pear tree growing within sight of May Hill, as they're supposed to. |
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The Unsophisticated Genius of Barbara Jones
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| Bateman the Opticians, Croydon, from 'The Unsophisticated Arts' |
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| Barbara Jones enjoying her work - what is that peculiar ornament on the bookshelf? |
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| No detail too small... Interior of a canal boat, from 'The Unsophisticated Arts' |
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| Never judge a book by its cover? Maybe in this case... |
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| Ravilious would have loved this, from 'The Unsophisticated Arts' |
When the Romans left England there were a thousand dull years filled only with ballads, pipe and tabor, folk dancing and maypoles. Gradually, however, the fairs emerge from the manuscripts, the tumblers and dancing bears begin to perform, and at last there is something to look at.
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| from 'Recording Britain', early 1940s (V&A) |
He makes beautiful patterns with carcasses and joints and festoons of sausages or, when meat is scarce, he hangs up sheets of paper by their corners, cut into patterns if he has time, and heightened with loops of black pudding.
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| Interior of saddler's shop, Croydon, from 'Recording Britain' (V&A) I wonder if this was her Dad's place, as he was a successful Croydon saddler. |
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| St Mary's Homes and Chapel, Godstone, 'Recording Britain' (V&A) |
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| Fairground litho, 1946 (V&A) - there's a detailed chapter on this subject in 'The Unsophisticated Arts' |
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| An extraordinary cover for an extraordinary book... |
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| On a lighter note... an illustration from 'The Unsophisticated Arts' |
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| Original artwork for 'Gift Book', on display at Burgh House, Hampstead, June 2013 |
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| Original artwork from 'The Unsophisticated Arts' - also at Burgh House |
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| Stook Duck Houses, Calbourne Water Mill, Isle of Wight |
She was the author of three important books that significantly affected the taste and perception of her contemporaries in ways that more famous artists have never succeeded in doing. The first, The Unsophisticated Arts (1951), opened people’s eyes to the art in everyday life … and that the enjoyment of art was not restricted to an educated few, but was available for the enjoyment of all. It is difficult to over-emphasise her work in this area, but one can see the effects in the displays in almost every museum and gallery throughout the country today. The second, Follies and Grottoes, developed an entirely new field for architectural and building historians, and led to the founding of an international society … The third, Design for Death (1967), sparked a similar fashion for the study of funeral customs, cemeteries, and artifacts associated with death … How many other artists and writers can boast of having achieved so much in changing the perception and temper of succeeding generations? … The roll-call of English artists in the twentieth century is not so lengthy that we can afford to overlook such a distinctive figure. (BC Bloomfield – The Life and Work of Barbara Jones [1912-1978] via Ash Rare Books)
All work shown is the copyright of Barbara Jones's estate.
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Eye 85, Russian Picture Books & 'Ravilious: Submarine'
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| Cover of 'Hunting' by Vladimir Lebedev, 1925 |
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| Vladimir Lebedev, Yesterday and Today, 1928 |
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| Barnett Freedman, Advert for Baynard Press |
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| Pearl Binder, A Restaurant in Brick Lane, 1932 |
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| Eric Ravilious, Submarine Dream, 1941 |
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Decorative Tiles, Marine House, Beer, Devon
Went to Beer at the weekend and, once again, failed to have a beer. We did have some delicious fish and chips though, and got to watch fishermen winching their boats up the beach with reassuringly little regard for newfangled health-and-safety nonsense. These tiles decorate the outside wall of Marine House, which I imagine used to be either a restaurant or a shop selling fish-related items. It's now a rather nice art gallery...
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| An athletic skate |
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| I love this one |
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| Not a very happy fish |
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| Perhaps he knows where he's heading... |
Info on the gallery and exhibitions here.
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Tate Britain Rehang, feat. Gwen John
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| Four female subjects; one woman artist |
The rehang has been praised as reactionary, but while there is an old-fashioned feel to the whole thing - no info panels, hooray! - I'm not sure this is right. I started off my tour with the spirit of John Berger at my side, lamenting the excessive numbers of rich men in fancy clothes - not to mention that terrible painting of the blushing maid with the melon, surely a candidate for a long spell in Tate Storage.
Things became more interesting as the 19th century opened up. How fun to see such different pictures next to each other; how great to have a Constable oil sketch opposite a finished painting, so you can look back and forth and wonder which gave him greater pleasure or shows his truest feelings. The mid-Victorian room is, as others have pointed out, a bit of a nightmare, with some much-loved pictures hung so high you'd need to hire a cherry picker to look at them properly.
Tate's highly-qualified curatorial team may have got off lightly in terms of label-writing, but they've still given us a carefully edited version of British art history. We're clearly meant to pay more attention to Nevinson and Gertler, for instance, than to some of the Pre-Raphaelites. And we're asked - without actually being asked - to look again at the role of women in art. It's unfortunate that not all the work is the artist's best, with Frances Hodgkins for one represented by a very odd picture, but there are some lovely moments where the juxtaposition of different pieces encourages a bit of independent thought.
My favourite of these is shown above: three classic visions of women as seen by men, and one self-portrait. We have a lovely girl playing Eve, leaving Eden in disgrace, and a woman sitting meaningfully before a mirror (in which the artist is reflected), and a naked woman looking modest in a black hat - all, incidentally, beautiful and sensitive representations. Above them, gazing out over the gallery, is Gwen John. She isn't symbolising anything. She is neither beautiful nor ashamed. She is a serious person endeavouring perhaps to understand something of her life and condition through self-scrutiny. It isn't at all clear what she has learnt.
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Eric Ravilious: Victorian Cricketers for Wisden
As I was working on the new Mainstone Press book of wood engravings by Eric Ravilious and listening to Test Match Special on the radio I couldn't resist posting the artist's iconic illustration, along with the text that will accompany it...
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Cricket fans will recognise this illustration, which has adorned the cover of The Wisden Cricketers' Almanack since 1938. Tasked with updating the already-venerable annual for its 75th anniversary, Robert Harling invited Ravilious to create a wood engraving, the result a design Harling described as 'an ideal graphic introduction to one of England's most durable publications'. It no doubt helped that the artist was a cricket fan, as spectator and occasional player. In 1935 he organised a trip to Lords for Henry Moore and other old RCA friends, and the same year played cricket for the Double Crown Club at the beautiful ground on the hill above Castle Hedingham, reporting the next day that he was ‘not out, hit four balls and made 1, also bowled a few overs and in consequence feel as stiff as a poker’. Playing again on the outbreak of World War II he hit three sixes, writing afterwards that it was ‘one of the pleasures of life, hitting a six.’
Eric Ravilious: Wood Engravings will be published by The Mainstone Press in the autumn.
Cricket fans will recognise this illustration, which has adorned the cover of The Wisden Cricketers' Almanack since 1938. Tasked with updating the already-venerable annual for its 75th anniversary, Robert Harling invited Ravilious to create a wood engraving, the result a design Harling described as 'an ideal graphic introduction to one of England's most durable publications'. It no doubt helped that the artist was a cricket fan, as spectator and occasional player. In 1935 he organised a trip to Lords for Henry Moore and other old RCA friends, and the same year played cricket for the Double Crown Club at the beautiful ground on the hill above Castle Hedingham, reporting the next day that he was ‘not out, hit four balls and made 1, also bowled a few overs and in consequence feel as stiff as a poker’. Playing again on the outbreak of World War II he hit three sixes, writing afterwards that it was ‘one of the pleasures of life, hitting a six.’
Eric Ravilious: Wood Engravings will be published by The Mainstone Press in the autumn.
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Win 'Ravilious in Pictures'!
Competition time again! To win all four books in the 'Ravilious in Pictures' series simply name the six watercolours painted by Ravilious that feature chalk hill figures or white horses.... First out of the hat on Tuesday 18 June (9am sharp) wins - providing you got them all right! ... Good luck! Please email: info(at)themainstonepress.com to enter [changing (at) to @].
And why not have a look at the 'Ravilious in Pictures' Facebook page? Lots of Rav-related stuff but also wonderful pictures by a host of (mostly) 20th century British artists, plus news of events and such-like.
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Edward Seago and St Benet's Abbey
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| Edward Seago, St Benet's Abbey, watercolour |
Anyway, I was there partly to visit the painting grounds of Edward Seago, a 20th century British landscape painter who is best known for his association with the Royal family. I'm writing the text for a new book which I hope will both communicate something of Seago's fascinating character and remarkable life, and show the range and beauty of his work.
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| Edward Seago, St Benet's Marsh, Evening Haze, oil |
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| John Sell Cotman, St Benet's Abbey |
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| John Sell Cotman, St Benet's Abbey, oil |
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| Edward Seago, St Benet's Abbey, oil |
Red sails and white still seem to sail across the fields although, as you approach the river, you see the extraordinary array of craft, from canoes to pleasure cruisers, that ply the Broads today.
Edward Seago's paintings remain the copyright of his estate, which is represented by The Portland Gallery.
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