Eric Ravilious: Artist and Designer

by Alan Powers

More popular than ever, the work of Eric Ravilious (1903-42) is rooted in the landscape of pre-war and early wartime England. This new book by Alan Powers, the established authority on Ravilious, provides the most comprehensive overview to date of the artist's work in all media - watercolour, illustration, printmaking, graphic design, textiles and ceramics - and firmly positions Ravilious as a major figure in the history of early 20th-century British art.In an accessible and engaging text, copiously illustrated with reproductions of work drawn from a range of sources, Alan Powers discusses the part Ravilious' work played in creating an English style, positioned between tradition and modernism, and borrowing from naive and popular art of the past. The book analyses Ravilious' different spheres of activity in turn, covering his education and formative influences, his mural painting, his printmaking and illustration, his work as leader in forming a new style of watercolour painting between the wars and his final period as an official War Artist. In a career curtailed by an early death, Ravilious also played a significant role as a designer; Powers argues that Ravilious showed how decoration and historical reference could find a place in the reform of the applied arts whilst simultaneously renewing a sense of national identity.Eric Ravilious will be welcomed by all those with an interest in an artist whose imagination was backed by great skill and a sharp eye for the unusual.

Genres: Art

216 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2013

About the author

Alan Powers is a teacher, researcher and writer specialising in architecture and design.

Powers trained as an art historian at University of Cambridge, gaining an undergraduate degree and a PhD.

As a writer Powers has been prolific, writing reviews, magazine articles, obituaries of artists and architects as well as books. He has concentrated on 20th century British architecture and architectural conservation. He has also written books on the design of book jackets, shop fronts, book collectors, and the artist Eric Ravilious as well as monographs on Serge Chermayeff, and the British firms of Tayler and Green and of Aldington, Graig and Collinge.

Reviews

[Carlton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Following my reading of Sybil & Cyril by Jenny Uglow and Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper by Alexandra Harris, this is a beautifully illustrated monograph of another English artist/illustrator of the inter-war years.
The text is interesting, providing some historical and biographical background, but concentrating on the art, and it is the numerous illustrations that make this book worthwhile.
Reading a whole book about Ravilious hasn’t been an artistic revelation, as I have already seen illustrations of what I still consider to be the most memorable and impactful works. However the author has done an excellent job of showing the different mediums in which Ravilious worked, woodcuts and watercolours are expected, but there are also murals (now mainly lost), designs for Wedgewood Potteries, fabric designs and even furniture.

For me, Ravilious’ most engaging picture is the watercolour Train Landscape from 1939, with the chalk Westbury Horse seen through a railway carriage window. It surprised me to realise that the picture only measures about 44cm x 55cm. However seeing illustrations of so much work by Ravilious, the consistent emotional detachment of the art became very evident as you are exposed to the repeated absence or simplification of human figures. But this detachment can also create a nostalgic, timeless quality, even when the landscape is anchored with contemporary (now historical) objects.

A 2013 Guardian review which I think captures something of what I feel:
[Ravilious] remains the artist of the empty landscape and the uninhabited room, of a transient period in national life when the old and the new could still, just, be reconciled – even if he did have to create a parallel imaginative reality in which to do it.

[Bodil · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a student, I spent some time at Aberdeen University and was a frequent visitor to Aberdeen Art Gallery. One of my absolute favorurite paintings there was Eric Ravilious’ Train Landscape. And so it remains. However, now I have seen more of his painting and really appreciate his calm art. I enjoyed reading this book, not just admiring all the illustration. I now know much more about one of my favourite artists and will now start on Tirzah Garwood’s (his wife) autobiography!