Eric Ravilious

This country is blessed with a number of small galleries, often well-hidden in suburbs, that contain powerful concentrations of great art. They’re easier to handle than the great city-centre monsters, where the eyes and brain eventually become too tired to absorb any more beauty.

 

I am thinking here partly of the Barber Institute at Birmingham University, Lady Lever’s gallery at Port Sunlight, and of Kenwood and Dulwich in London. The Christ Church picture gallery in Oxford is also (whenever I have been there) secluded and  tranquil.

 

Dulwich, close to the school that produced P.G. Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler and Nigel Farage, always seems quite astounding when you arrive. Here amid the expansive Edwardian suburbs of the better part of South London sits an extraordinary piece of architecture crammed with Old Masters.

 

One expects such things in the midst of cities. In such a setting it is an incongruous surprise, and all the better for it.  I have only ever visited it three times, because it requires a bit of extra effort to take a train deep into the SE postal districts and, as I work but do not live in London, I’m normally busy during the daylight hours when it’s open.

 

But last Tuesday I had to go to London when I normally wouldn’t have done,  and so I decided that,  since the day was interrupted anyway, I’d visit the Eric Ravilious exhibition which Dulwich is holding for the next few weeks. If you are anywhere within range, then it is a very pleasant (if quite costly) excursion. The gallery is a pleasant destination anyway, ten minutes on foot from the nearest station, with its own restaurant and a café in the rather serene gardens. On a clear sunny spring day, it is especially pleasing, London as one might wish it to be.  If you are not in range, a very fine selection of his pictures has now been published in book form, though it will set you back £25.

 

You’ll almost certainly have seen at least one Ravilious picture – the famous one of the chalk white horse on a hill, viewed through the windows of an old-fashioned railway carriage. Cricket enthusiasts will have many times seen and half-noticed his woodcut of Victorian cricketers, displayed every year since 1938 in the cover of Wisden.

 

Ravilious’s painting is intensely English, in what I might describe as an Orwellian way. Many of his pictures would make good cover illustrations for an edition of Orwell's essays.  I assume, as I look at his pictures,  that he liked strong tea, bitter beer, apples,  country walks, sea-winds and birdsong. His paintings almost radiate Englishness, the consciousness of being an islander, of being quieter, more modest and more determined than our neighbours, the deeper, quieter sense of humour that’s not always obvious. There’s also a feeling that one could be cultured, well-read and informed without intellectual pretension, and when it was not yet necessary to be left-wing to be considered intelligent. The work of that rather different genius, Edward Ardizzone, comes from the same era and gives me a similar sensation (Ardizzone was also a war artist, and his rather unsparing studies of the aftermath of battle come as a shock if you are used to his children's books).

 

I think this sort of Englishness reached its peak in the 1940s, during the early, worrying years of the war  and died away thereafter. You could still find it in odd corners in my childhood, a wistful look, a cadence in the voice, a certain way of smiling, none of them to be seen or heard now. I say all this though I know very little about Ravilious’s life, or even the origin of his unusual name, which sounds a bit as if it comes from Lithuania. They are simply thoughts brought into my mind by looking at his work. 

 

He would be better-known had he not died in the war. He was an official war artist, and was lost somewhere off Iceland in August 1942. He had chosen to fly in a group of aircraft searching for a lost plane, I do not know why. He was apparently very used to flying and had spent long hours in biplanes, sketching other aircraft in flight from the co-pilot's seat. His own machine did not return.

 

Thus his work is poignantly and abruptly cut off, at the age of 39 when he had so much left to do. This consciousness of loss hangs over the little exhibition, with its evocative and powerful studies of warlike things, often from surprising and thoughtful angles (I was especially moved by a view from a camouflaged warship leaving Scapa Flow, where my father was based a few years later).

 

These are all very interesting and full of wartime seriousness endeavour, though in or two cases probably technically a bit odd (it is pretty clear that he did not understand how artillery worked) . But the peacetime work is if anything even more fascinating, bathing machines (already obsolete) in a the pale seaside sunshine of Suffolk, a lifeboat pulled up on the beach, its propellors showing, the famous railway view, studies of those two bizarre and puzzling chalk figures, the (very rude) Cerne Abbas Giant and the Long man of Wilmington. He obviously greatly enjoyed painting amid chalk downs , and there are hints, in or two works, of that other small-scale genius, Samuel Palmer, whose ‘White Cloud’ I especially love.

 

If you do go, be careful not to miss what I think is the loveliest thing in the whole collection. It is a woodcut of a boy birds-nesting, that country activity which is now not just forgotten but illegal. It is very small, and in a flat glass case, not on the wall.  Beside the beautiful, intricate print of the boy taking an egg from a perfect nest as outraged birds flutter round him  is the actual block in which the image was cut, and next to that are the tools with which it was done. It made me gasp to imagine the skill and patience with which it must have been achieved, and the mind which could take what his eyes saw and make such a lovely image of it with his hands. I wish I could do that. But I can’t. and can only rejoice that he could. And be glad that these things survive and can be seen.