The perfect excuse to get out all the best Ravilious china

A day trip to the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne is a summer pleasure, and two concurrent shows are proving a considerable draw, with their focus on design and applied art. Designing the Everyday is in some ways just an excuse to get out all the best Ravilious china and show it with his working drawings, but where’s the harm in that? Ravilious continues to be one of the most popular of 20th-century British artists, and his applied art is not as well known as his pellucid watercolours, so here’s a chance to remedy that. And to put it in context, the surrounding rooms examine work from both earlier and later periods: a light-hearted and enjoyable selection by guest curator Nathaniel Hepburn.

Room 1 deals with Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop and includes a couple of lovely Gaudier-Brzeska sculptures — a bronze sleeping fawn and an earthenware cat — together with Fry’s own ceramic jug, large, white and rather chipped. Around the walls are some interesting things: an oil by Frederick Etchells entitled ‘A Group of Figures’, also his hand-knotted wool rug for the 1913 Ideal Home Exhibition, a geometric Vorticist design in yellow, blue, pink and grey. Etchells, a painter turned architect, is an intriguing figure and needs more exposure.

Here, too, is a series of stylised Wyndham Lewis designs for lampshades and a couple of his ink drawings. Then follows a room of Shell’s memorable 1930s lithographed posters, McKnight Kauffer and John Armstrong to the fore, also Cedric Morris, Edward Bawden and Graham Sutherland. A third room takes ‘Modern Art for the Table’ in 1934 as a theme, with unexpected designs by Paul Nash, also Armstrong and Sutherland again. A wall of Ravilious plates makes a tremendous display, and there’s a whole room devoted to his work for Wedgwood. Note the three glorious Coronation mugs.