Familiar Visions: Eric & James Ravilious, Father & Son
Towner, Eastbourne, until 5 September
Ravilious Woodcuts
Charleston Farmhouse, until 30 August
Everyone, but everyone, has heard of Charleston, the East Sussex farmhouse with the beautiful walled garden transformed by the decorative geniuses of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant into a bijou Bloomsbury-on-the-Downs. But few people know about Furlongs, a couple of miles across the fields, the decidedly unpicturesque flint-built cottage where from 1933 the designer Peggy Angus presided over a rather more basic bohemian establishment, visited regularly by Eric Ravilious.
That the two artistic camps had nothing in common is immediately obvious from a pair of Ravilious watercolours in the Towner’s new exhibition Familiar Visions: Eric & James Ravilious, Father & Son. In ‘Interior at Furlongs’ (1939), a shady room with a single bentwood chair and a pair of red curtains opens on to sunlit fields beyond a low flint wall; in ‘Tea at Furlongs’ (1939) a kitchen table has been set up in the corner of the wall, laid with a couple of plain white plates and mugs. There’s no garden to speak of, no Omega Workshops china, just a black umbrella fixed to a pole doubling as a faintly sinister sunshade.
It was visiting Furlongs in 1934 that first inspired Ravilious, then working as a wood engraver, to take his watercolour landscapes seriously ‘because’, as he later told Peggy, ‘the colour of the landscape was so lovely and the design so beautifully obvious’. Unsympathetic to the hot colours favoured by Bloomsbury, he sought ‘beautiful grey weather of just the right sort’ and at Furlongs he found it. Over the next five years he mapped the surrounding Downs in his distinctive, mildly distorted topsygraphical way, tweaking the natural patterning of land and sky with the help of man-made fences, roads and odd bits of machinery: a ‘Waterwheel’ (1934) standing sentinel on the edge of the Downs; an abandoned hand plough rusting on the ‘Downs in Winter’ (1934); and a dusty ‘Dolly Engine’ (1934) in the white ‘lunar’ landscape of the Asham Cement Works, which, he admitted, ‘frightens me just a bit’. In 1939, under the shadow of war, he painted ‘The Wilmington Giant’ behind a flimsy barrier of barbed-wire fencing, and the chalk cliffs of Beachy Head — a sturdier defence — with the triangular beam of lighthouse at its foot raking the darkness like a searchlight.
The war would claim Ravilious three years later when, as an Official War Artist, he was lost on an air-sea rescue mission over Iceland. His photographer son James was only three at the time, but there are family resemblances in this father and son show, where a selection of black-and-white photographs of rural life in north Devon taken by James in the Seventies and Eighties for the Beaford photographic archive hangs opposite his father’s wood engravings. In ‘Abandoned seed drill in woods’ (1979) or ‘Collapsed sheds in the Great Blizzard’ (1978) we see shades of Eric, but James’s pictures have a human interest his father’s lack. Eric’s watercolours are almost entirely empty of people, although he did allow figures to enliven his wood engravings, of which there is a separate exhibition — including some exquisite wood blocks as finely carved as seals — at Charleston.
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