Eric Ravilious (1903-1942), a pastoralist through and through, was one of only three official war artists to die in action during the second world war. It was a malign fate that marked out such an unmartial man, payment perhaps for not taking the war entirely seriously. When he was attached to the navy, Ravilious seemed not to notice the discomfort or the threat of death, his attention was caught instead by the chintz curtains in the sailors’ mess and by how much he enjoyed the experience, “even the bombing which is wonderful fireworks”. He died in a seaplane crash on a search and rescue mission off Iceland.
As the 80 watercolours in the exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery show, Ravilious’s wartime world was an extension of his prewar one. In the 1930s he liked to mix the man-made with the natural – a building in a landscape, a piece of farm machinery in a field, or a downland chalk figure seen through a wire fence or from a train window. He liked, too, to keep people out of the picture (there is barely a portrait in his work and almost nothing of family or the women he loved) and paint in heritage colours that were as subtle in tone as the scenes he portrayed. He depicted his skies and landscapes with “a starved brush” – dry watercolour rather than washes – and with lines and patterning that betrayed his training as an engraver. When the war came he kept his quirky viewpoints and unlikely juxtapositions and simply replaced the peacetime machinery with military hardware.
What he didn’t live to see was how those prewar pictures have become emblematic of an England that now seems impossibly remote – an undemonstrative, quiet and wholesome country. In its stillness and emptiness it was never a real place but an imaginary one. Ravilious was a man without angst and he painted in his own image. His vision of an English Neverland remains powerfully evocative.
• Ravilious is at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21, until 31 August. dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk.
