My Dad, Ray Hadlow, was a lifelong fan of Eric Ravilious. As an art student at Canterbury College of Art in the late 40s, both Ravilious and Edward Bawden, loomed large as very current successful artists, despite Ravilious having died in WWII. They had the added appeal of being relatively local, mainly working in London, Essex, and Sussex. When my brother and I sold our parents’ house, not long after Dad passed away and Mum moved into a care home, I helped myself to many of his books, including several on Ravilious and Bawden. This was one of them, a very attractive hardback, beautifully printed on thick paper, and with illustrations on almost every other page. Living in Lewes, Ravilious ranks second only to the Bloomsbury group in local significance. The Towner Gallery in Eastbourne has a permanent Ravilious exhibition, and many of his most famous works are of local views, so this book made an obvious choice for my interwar reading list.

There is a substantial introduction by Alan Powers, who is also the author of several books on Ravilious. He argues that Ravilious, Edward Bawden, and their circle are as important as the Pre-Raphaelites or the Bloomsbury Group, but suffer from not having a group name or manifesto, and while popular in their interwar heyday, they were almost forgotten for much of the later 20th century. Andy Friend also argues later in the book that there is also an element of snobbishness to their lack of recognition. Ravilious and Co were mostly lower middle class and had to work for a living and much of their output was commercial. Rather sneered at in the world of gallery exhibitions and the upper-class art market of the time. It is only the last few decades that their importance has been widely recognised.

The group coalesced at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington in the 1920s under the tutelage of William Rothenstein. Paul Nash was an occasional visiting tutor and both of the Nash brothers were important early influences. Ravilious remained close friends with John Nash for the rest of his life. Rothenstein believed that commercial art was as important as gallery art and encouraged Ravilious and Bawden to attend design classes. After graduating from the RCA, Ravilious took up a teaching post at Eastbourne art college, teaching mostly middle-class girls. It was there that he met his wife-to-be, Tirzah Garwood, who was also his most promising student. I really like her work, it’s got a fun, slightly satirical quality, all executed with considerable technical skill. One of her watercolours, of the interior of Barcombe Mill, I particularly like. Ravilious and Bawden also had their first significant exhibitions in London at this time alongside their fellow RCA friend Douglas Percy Bliss. To one London art critic they were mere juvenile disciples of Paul Nash without much to recommend them on their own merits. Despite this critical snub their growing reputation earned them their first major commission, the Morley College Murals, which took a year to complete and were widely praised at the time but sadly destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1941.

In 1930, Bawden married Charlotte Epton, a fellow RCA student, and as a wedding present, his parents bought him a house at Great Bardfield in Essex. Ravilious and Garwood were their lodgers along with several other artists, including Diana Low, Peggy Angus, and Thomas Hennell. Angus also rented a small cottage, Furlongs, just south of Lewes where Ravilious painted some of his famous scenes of the South Downs. While at Furlongs he also carried on affairs with both Diana Low and Helen Binyon while the long-suffering, and very tolerant, Tirzah had their first child. Later in the 30s Ravilious and Bawden made several excursions to Newhaven to paint the docks. These are some of my favourite Ravilious pictures. Newhaven in the 1930s was significantly more attractive than it is today! One puzzle from this period is the complete lack of contact between the Ravilious group and the Bloomsburys. The track between Virginia Woolf’s house in Rodmell and Charleston runs past the front door of Furlongs and yet there is no recorded interaction between them. Friend thinks this is because of their very different social class, and possibly a generational difference as well. With this in mind, it’s quite surprising to learn that one of their number was the prime minister Ramsay MacDonald’s daughter Ishbel and that Ravilious and Co attended several parties at number ten!

Ravilious and Bawden were heavily involved in the 1938 Paris exhibition. Ravilious designed the cover for the UK’s entry and both were involved, along with others from the group, in the design of the products on display. Another associate from the RCA, Cecilia Dunbar Kilburn, along with the RCA’s Registrar, Athole Hay, had started a commercial venture bringing together artists and manufacturers. They created a shop, Dunbar Hay, in London that sold the products. It was very successful and led to Ravilious creating designs for Wedgwood, including the now very rare Edward VIII Coronation Mug. Ravilious was very busy in the last year of peace before WWII, as he finally emerged as one of the leading young artists of the period. He continued to have a very complicated love life, with Tirzah remarkably tolerant of his infidelities. His friendship with Nash, another prolific womaniser, continued, even after Nash had an affair with one of Ravilious’s old flames, Helen Binyon.

The outbreak of WWII led to Ravilious being recruited by Kenneth Clarke’s War Artists Advisory Committee, a truly inspired government project. Ravilious received an honorary commission as a captain of marines in the royal navy, and spent the first year of the war painting naval scenes, including some spectacular images of the Norwegian campaign. Later he became very enthusiastic about flying and transferred to the RAF, which led to his final and fatal trip to RAF Kaldalarnes in Iceland. On the first morning after his arrival he left on a flight to search for an aircraft that had gone missing the night before, only for his aircraft to also not return. Neither the aircraft nor his body were ever found. Bawden survived the war, but only just. His ship returning from the Middle East was sunk and he had to spend several days drifting in a lifeboat before being interned by the Vichy French in Morocco, liberated by the Americans, taken to the US, and finally repatriated to England. Both John Nash and Tirzah Garwood survived the war only to die soon afterwards of illness.

Andy Friend writes very well, which seems to be a rarity amongst artists biographers. The book is wonderful for its insight into the bohemian world the RCA and Great Bardfield between the wars. So many interesting characters intersect with the story, so that like any good biography or history, leave me wanting to read more about the personalities and period. Another book pulled from my parents’ bookcase was Tirzah Garwood’s autobiography that I’m now keen to read. Ravilious was rather rotten to her and she obviously suffered from his infidelities, so it would be interesting to read the story from her point of view. I can’t say I’m hugely keen on the art though. I think much of it is pleasing, especially the Newhaven scenes, but I can’t say I’d rush to put one on my wall.