“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.

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?

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.

Eat your heart out David Schlockney

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.

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.