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The great artist of Deep England Eric Ravilious was continually inspired by the very ancient, distinctly charming nature of the country

Chalk paths, by Eric Ravilious. Credit: DeAgostini/Getty Images


June 10, 2020   6 mins

Eric Ravilious was not yet 40 when he died. The circumstances were tragic: in his capacity as a war artist he had travelled to a remote British base in south-west Iceland, RAF Kaldadarnes, which at the time — September 1942 — was on the front line of the Battle of the Atlantic. Soon after his arrival he hitched a lift on a Lockheed Hudson, one of three aircrafts sent to search for another Hudson that had gone missing the previous day. Ravilious’ aircraft also failed to return, and his body and those of the crew were never recovered.

It seems especially sad to me that he should have died so far from home, for Ravilious was one of the painters who caught something of the eternal essence of England. This has sometimes been called Deep England, a counterpart to the French conception of la France profonde — a phrase used to refer to an idealised, authentic France, rural and traditional, in touch with history and unpolluted by the modern world of industry, progress and rationalism.

Similarly, the idea of Deep England is focused on the England of the village church and the manor house, the maypole and the inn, the stone circle and the hedgerow. It is a place of stillness and peace. The landscapes of Deep England are beautiful and sometimes wild, but never overwhelming. Except in a few cases, it has never been a conscious ideology. However, it is undoubtedly there, as a powerful background for many of our artists, an unmistakeable vision of the country as something very ancient, with a distinct charm, a specific atmosphere.

Perhaps because of his unusual style — essentially figurative but with a dreamlike quality — Ravilious caught this well. Not for nothing did that (hopefully) immortal English institution, the Wisden Cricketers Almanack, choose his woodcut of Victorian gentlemen to adorn their front cover.

One of my favourite paintings of his is called ‘Shepherd’s Cottage’, which portrays a man hoeing the garden of an old house. In the foreground runs a lane, separated from the garden by a stone wall overgrown by ivy. In the distance the fields rise up to the slope of the South Downs.

Shepherd’s Cottage, by Eric Ravilious

It could easily be trite or twee, but the surrealist influence, and slightly odd use of perspective, means that it lacks the bucolic idealism of a sentimentalist. Ravilious generally avoided this trap. In his work there are no rosy-cheeked children tramping home to snow-covered cottages, and no buxom milkmaids leaning on five-bar gates while a handsome lad takes the cattle home in the soft light of sunset.

Ravilious was not alone among his contemporaries in making the English countryside his special subject. Between the wars he was part of a circle called the Great Bardfield group, a loose association of painters, sculptors and engravers based in and around the Essex village of that name. He was also friends with Edward Bawden and the Nash brothers, Paul and John. The Great Bardfield artists were highly diverse, yet one of the things they had in common was a love for the scenery of their native soil.

What comes through very strongly from a great deal of their work is a settled, secure Englishness. Crucially, this is unsullied by any kind of dubious politics. This was not always the case with exponents of English ruralism between the wars; love of people and land can easily shade into blood and soil nationalism of the aggressive and sinister kind.

Henry Williamson, the writer and countryman best known for Tarka The Otter, who wrote the most wonderful lyrical descriptions of Devon and Kent, became a follower of Oswald Mosley, and was briefly interned at the start of the Second World War. He retained an unsavoury ambivalence about Nazism for the rest of his life. Ravilious, by contrast, was a strong opponent of fascism, as one might expect from his light and playful sensibility. He raised money for the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, and apparently had to be dissuaded by friends from enlisting in the British Army as a private soldier when war broke out.”

His pictures put me in mind of a largely forgotten poem by Dorothy L Sayers, written in 1940 after the evacuation of the BEF from Dunkirk. It is called ‘The English War’ and, while not brilliant, conveys a sentiment which I find very interesting: a curious relief and relish, despite the disasters of Norway and Dunkirk, at the prospect of our once again fighting alone from our island redoubt, as we had so often done before. “This is the war that England knows”, she writes, when “men who love us not, yet look / To us for liberty”.

The poem refers to Drake and Napoleon and the Armada, the Cinque Ports and Plymouth Sound, appealing to a deep folk memory of being fundamentally an island race, and an old country. Sayers describes an England where terrains and environments have serious meaning and resonance because of the long continuity of the nation. This is why it is connected in my mind with Ravilious. His not-quite realist style gives the woods and hills and fields of England a fantastical air, a sense of mystery and enchantment, especially when he paints scenes or features that have endured for a very long time.

Arguably his best-known work, ‘Train Landscape’, shows the Westbury white horse from a carriage window. The Westbury white horse is not, in fact, enormously ancient — it was apparently created in the mid-eighteenth century. But it feels like it should be. It looks like something that has been there forever, and is redolent of the mingling of history and legend and myth. Many of our spectacular places have this same character — Tintagel, Lindisfarne, the fen country, the great Welsh castles.

‘Train landscape’, by Eric Ravilious

Those Ravilious pictures which do not portray famous landmarks somehow retain a mood of magic and possibility. Looking at compositions like ‘The Causeway’, the modern world of speed and steel and the aeroplane seems to recede from view. You might easily expect to see King Arthur or Alfred the Great or Hereward the Wake emerge from the trees. A personal favourite of mine, ‘Wet Afternoon’, features nothing more exciting than a man walking down a country lane in a rain shower. Nevertheless, the hedges on either side of the lane are imbued with an air of fairytale anticipation.

‘Wet Afternoon’, by Eric Ravilious

In this connection, it is worth touching on Ravilious’ woodcuts and engravings. They use big bold shapes and overlapping interlaced patterns of black and white to create landscapes that are at once familiar and odd, natural and unnatural. Sometimes mythical creatures appear. A few of them are rather eerie because of the strange silhouettes of trees and hills, after the manner of the illustrations in a Brothers Grimm story. But those ones with a heightened impression of the uncanny are securely tied to real places. They are the product of a vision that was formed in, and continually inspired by, particular locations in a particular country — England.

Even when Ravilious took up his brush in the service of his country, as a war artist, his approach never become bombastic or jingoistic. He painted the nation at war with the same understated, and unconscious, patriotism that informs his earlier pictures. The men in the wartime pictures, whether Royal Navy sailors braving the North Sea, or members of the Royal Observer Corps scanning the skies over the Channel, are carrying out their difficult and dangerous tasks with a minimum of fuss. You can almost hear the whispered banter and smell the steaming mugs of hot strong tea. The gentle, unshowy determination and grit that was for so long a part of the English self-image radiates out from the canvas.

‘Convoy passing an island’, by Eric Ravilious

One picture in particular touches on one of the paradoxes of the traditional English character. In ‘Convoy Passing An Island’, a track passing a cottage garden is contrasted with a long line of merchantmen steaming out into the North Sea. The homely blends with the grand and warlike. One might view this as an artistic attempt, deliberate or not, to reconcile one of the great tensions in our national self-image, between the conception of ourselves as a nation of no-nonsense islanders minding our own business — “this happy breed of men, this little world” — and the reality of our being a global superpower.

We will never know what Ravilious might have accomplished had he survived the war. The poignancy of his premature death is heightened for me by the erosion over the last few decades of the quiet, peaceful, modest, whimsical England that he recorded so beautifully. As Philip Larkin put it in his ‘Going, Going’:

“And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.”

One final thought: a fancy of mine is that he might have been a good choice to illustrate The Lord Of The Rings. Tolkien created fictional geographies that closely resembled those of this island, except with a heightened wildness, strangeness and antiquity. Ravilious, with his instinct for conveying the true nature of the English landscape, for giving his paintings and prints a strong sense of place and history and majesty, might just have been a perfect match.


Niall Gooch is a public sector worker and occasional writer who lives in Kent.

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Seb Dakin
Seb Dakin
4 years ago

Fascinating pictures and I couldn’t agree more with your point about Tolkien. Thank you.

maveperrin
maveperrin
4 years ago

“It seems especially sad to me that he should have died so far from home, for Ravilious was one of the painters who caught something of the eternal essence of England.” I found this so moving.

amandapcraig
amandapcraig
4 years ago

What a wonderful essay – it does what the best essays do, exploring ideas that I had half-begun to think,n and now understand better. I am especially pleased to find out that an artist I deeply admire was against Fascism, because during the 1930s the love of England and its countryside and folk-lore became polluted by this hideous philosophy. Excellent point about Tolkien.

Nigel Clarke
Nigel Clarke
4 years ago

I love Ravilious!
Over the last few years his works, and especially his paintings, seem to be getting the notoriety they richly deserve.
There was an excellent exhibition of his wartime works as an official war artist at the Dulwich Picture Gallery a few years ago, I went 3 times! And I don’t live anywhere near London. I keep looking out for any news of further exhibitions…

He was just so prolific and talented, and it is so so sad that he never lived to realise what would have been an extraordinary career.
Although the originals sadly also never survived the war, his series of shopfront lithographs are a lovey record of the inter-war high street and the shops that adorned them. First published in 1938 and limited to a run of only 2000, V&A released a beautiful facsimile edition of the “High Street” with a text by JM Richards

Ravilious captured the “Englishness” of England as much and as well as Hopper captured the “American-ness” of 1930’s America. How about a joint Ravilious/Hopper exhibition…anything you can do there Mr Gooch?

andy young
andy young
4 years ago

I live about 6 miles from Great Bardfield. It’s surrounded by an unremarkable landscape, but it’s subtle, suggestive, & has a long history, not always peaceful. There’s a reason why M. R. James set a lot of his ghost stories in East Anglia …

Tom Hawk
Tom Hawk
4 years ago

I will get flamed for this but…
I am always wary if people who “portray” the countryside, whether through music, poetry or painting. They never actually work in or earn a living from the subject they are in love with.

Wordsworth wandered lonley as a cloud, He never wandered desperate as a farmer seeking a lost animal knowing it could be dead with all the implications for his finances. Potter used her money from selling books to buy farms in the Lake District at inflated prices that were beyond the economic value so she could impose her idea of how the landscape should look. By doing so, she ignored the fact the landscape she loved the idea of is the result of scraping a livlihood from unforgiving and unproductive soil.

It is easy to idolise the shepherd hoeing his vegetables. It is a different matter to do the hoeing, then walk the animals to the distant hills and stand in the open all day garding over them to protect from predictors and finally walk them back at the end of the day, and do the same year in year out.

Bruno Noble
Bruno Noble
4 years ago
Reply to  Tom Hawk

..

ruthengreg
ruthengreg
4 years ago

Thank you for something totally different for not at lover through ignorance, yes I like looking at pictures a lot. But that’s as far as I tend to take it. But this artist and the article stirred something. And it was nice distraction from everything going on.. Many thanks

Jane Wright
Jane Wright
4 years ago

I am now so keen to see more of his work when we can, but I would especially like to see the landscape at the top of the article.
Could anyone tell me its title and whether it is in a public collection?
Thank you

mary.p.morley
mary.p.morley
4 years ago
Reply to  Jane Wright

It is called ‘Chalk Paths’. Not sure whether it is held in a public collection. Possibly the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne

jeremynash147
jeremynash147
4 years ago
Reply to  mary.p.morley

Thank you

jkbeelzebub
jkbeelzebub
4 years ago
Reply to  Jane Wright

According to a book I have on Ravilious (Masterpieces ofbof Art by Susie Hodge), it’s in a private collection. But as the previous respondent says, there is an excellent collection of many of his other works at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, which is highly recommended.

tjosephus
tjosephus
4 years ago

A breath of fresh air to read (and look at) this piece this morning instead of the usual stuff. Thanks.

Lee Johnson
Lee Johnson
4 years ago

Eat your heart out David Schlockney

Richard Bell
Richard Bell
4 years ago

I just received a book yesterday by JOHN GARTH …… ” The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien “. I could not agree more regarding your last paragraph. My favorite Ravilious painting is Caravans …… As a school Child of 14 or so I was on the South Downs above Chichester and sheltered in an old Steel Wheeled shepherd’s hut which appeared out of the rain up a similar track …… Have never forgotten that day !

Mela King
Mela King
4 years ago

Very interesting, thank you. I’m ashamed to say I knew nothing of this artist before reading this article. The most famous painting from the inside of the train carriage is the one I like the least, however, I found the ‘Wet Afternoon’ magnificent.

Trevor Q
Trevor Q
4 years ago

Thank you I enjoyed reading that.

Mark Bishop
Mark Bishop
4 years ago

A great tragedy is that the biggest collection of Ravilious’ work – belonging to the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne – is kept mostly in storage, there being insufficient space to display it all, combined with a focus on mounting shows of other artists’ output, often of questionable merit.

Esmon Dinucci
Esmon Dinucci
4 years ago

I agree with a lot of what has been written below. I’d heard of Ravilious from some strange art school escapees into the teaching profession in the early 70s but hadn’t realised how good he was and mistook some of the images displayed for the work of another artist. His story reminds me of that of Edward Thomas who was killed by a suffocating bomb explosion very near the end of the first world war – he was also a man who did the right thing – he was also – although this is incidental – the first poet whose poem I learned by heart and still recite whenever I am allowed the opportunity – so much creativity and so much loss – ou sont les nieges D’Autan?