Ravilious & Co

The Pattern of Friendship

Andy Friend, Alan Powers

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780500773895
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

In recent years Eric Ravilious has become recognized as one of the most important British artists of the 20th century, whose watercolours and wood engravings capture an essential sense of place and the spirit of mid-century England. What is less appreciated is that he did not work in isolation, but within a much wider network of artists, friends and lovers influenced by Paul Nashs teaching at the Royal College of Art Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman, Enid Marx, Tirzah Garwood, Percy Horton, Peggy Angus and Helen Binyon among them.

The Ravilious group bridged the gap between fine art and design, and the gentle, locally rooted but spritely character of their work came to be seen as the epitome of contemporary British values. Seventy-five years after Raviliouss untimely death, Andy Friend tells the story of this group of artists from their student days through to the Second World War. Ravilious & Co. explores how they influenced each other and how a shared experience animated their work, revealing the significance in this pattern of friendship of women artists, whose place within the history of British art has often been neglected. Generously illustrated and drawing on extensive research, and a wealth of newly discovered material, Ravilious & Co. is an enthralling narrative of creative achievement, joy and tragedy.

CHAPTER ONE

SOUTH KENSINGTON

‘I’ve quite firmly resigned my usher’s job at the Royal College of Art & I’m not going to lecture again if I can possibly afford not to … I’m going to settle down to paint again.’ Paul Nash wrote this in April 1925, during a spell of part-time teaching he disparaged as a distraction, unable to foresee its impact on England’s visual culture in the 1930s. Looking back then on the pattern of friendship and chain of achievement that had flowed from it, he realized how fortunate he was that his time at South Kensington coincided with ‘an outbreak of talent’.¹

Those he had in mind judged themselves even more fortunate. Towards the end of her life, Enid Marx reflected: ‘Paul Nash was the magnet that drew us together’ and ‘we formed a lifelong friendship with Paul, who in turn befriended us and helped us freely with introductions to clients’. For one of her peers, Nash’s arrival at the College was ‘like an explosion’ because his focus on ideas, literature and the arts as a whole, rather than on technique alone, ‘enlarged our minds … made us aware of beauty’.²

The hard-working, easily slighted Edward Bawden thought Nash was first rate because he never resorted to sarcasm, unlike older professors who tried to sound profound while being evasive. He did not ‘hand out propaganda for his own point of view’, and tried to bring out ‘whatever seemed unique in a student’. He was ‘a practising artist of great distinction who was willing to treat students as though they too were artists of distinction’.³

One of those students was Bawden’s friend Eric Ravilious. Nash soon became confident that this slightly diffident, charming twenty-one-year-old had the design skills to make a success of commercial illustration projects. Enrolling for his second year, Ravilious had entered ‘Mainly teaching’ as his career aim, but shortly after Nash’s arrival he responded ‘Possibly book decoration’; a year later Nash secured his election to the Society of Wood Engravers and introduced Ravilious to his connections at the Curwen Press.⁴

1.1
Paul Nash, Proud Paul,
wood-engraved self-portrait, 1922.

Nash’s impact on a generation of students in the Design School was all the more remarkable because his time there as a visiting instructor spanned less than thirty days during late 1924 and early summer 1925, interrupted by four months in France and Italy. It was an interlude that probably would never have happened had the proceeds of a successful exhibition arrived sooner; when they did, Nash had already accepted the job offered by his old friend and supporter William Rothenstein, the reforming RCA Principal.⁵

The two had first met in April 1910 when Rothenstein, judging student work displayed at a monthly sketch club, had awarded Nash full marks for a mystical drawing and its accompanying poem.⁶ As Nash later described the Bolt Court art classes, ‘the students were young men who worked at various commercial jobs during the day, coming here in the evening to improve their drawing, to practise design or to learn lithography and etching. The whole purpose of the school was avowedly practical. You were there to equip yourself for making a living.’⁷ Although Nash had already decided to try and earn his living as ‘a black and white artist or illustrator of some sort’, his mother had recently died after enduring years of depression and it was a time of great emotional vulnerability for the twenty-one-year-old. His inability to master maths had progressively ruled out the careers in the navy, architecture and banking deemed suitable for the elder son of a barrister; and, although supportive of Paul’s chosen path, having met years of nursing-home costs, his father was under considerable financial pressure. So when Rothenstein advised him to study at the Slade, Nash doubted the fees could be afforded. Looking at his work, Rothenstein suggested ‘Well, then, why not make them for yourself?’ and, when he held his first exhibition, purchased a drawing. Years later Nash would write to him: ‘you did the kindest and most impressive thing … it was without exaggeration one of the thrills of my life’.⁸

As a schoolboy, Rothenstein, third child of a prosperous Yorkshire wool merchant, had himself demonstrated such startling mathematical incapacity at Bradford Grammar that his teacher mocked him as ‘Genius!’ Art classes became his refuge, but in the 1880s they mainly involved drawing cubes and cylinders; it took the natural world and expeditions to nearby quarries and moors to feed his promising early work. A year among the plaster casts of the then ‘spiritless’ Slade followed before he left London aged seventeen for the libertine atmosphere of Paris, meeting Verlaine, Rodin, Whistler and Degas during a four-year stay.⁹ A loyal friend to the imprisoned Oscar Wilde, by 1910 Rothenstein had established himself as portraitist to Edwardian society, erudite critic, leading exhibitor with the New English Art Club and increasingly intense cultural man about town. To Nash he now became a source of generous support at critical junctures. In the years before 1914 he recommended Nash’s work to collectors, and then in 1917 joined a successful, in all probability life-saving, campaign to have him appointed an official war artist before his protégé was returned to the devastated terrain of northern France.¹⁰

The following years were troubled ones for Nash, now ‘a war artist without a war’, as he sought direction and became embroiled in controversy as an art critic.¹¹ In June 1921 the artist Lovat Fraser died suddenly while holidaying with the Nashes at Dymchurch, and shortly after Nash found his own father comatose. As a consequence Nash himself blacked out, lay unconscious in a London hospital for a week, and was forbidden to work while recovering. Rothenstein organized a group of friends who rallied to his financial aid, and Nash’s subsequent convalescence at Dymchurch became the prelude to his most prolific phase of work on ‘the marsh and this strange coast’, a burst of work that also saw publication of his books Places (1923) and Genesis (1924), containing two of his finest sets of wood engravings.¹²

By now Rothenstein was three years into his efforts to shake up the RCA and its four schools of Painting & Drawing, Architecture, Sculpture and Design – to which reorganization had recently added a fifth, the School of Engraving.¹³ The Board of Education had appointed him hoping he would reform an institution perceived as hide-bound, overly focused on the training of art teachers rather than artists, and too academic to make a meaningful contribution to raising the quality of industrial design – an objective of the RCA and its predecessors since the early Victorian era. As Rothenstein wrote to the President of the Board of Education before his appointment: ‘We have amongst us too many trivial painters and indifferent teachers and too few good and adventurous craftsmen or designers of distinction.’¹⁴

Rothenstein was intent on pursuing his painting career two days a week and, attracting opposition, adopted a gradualist approach at the RCA, taking advantage of – and occasionally provoking – staff departures to move things forward. He introduced greater informality, with Sunday-night ‘at homes’ where invited students could meet some of the many cultural figures he knew, and regularly drew on this network for outside speakers. When the unexpected resignation of the Professor of Sculpture created an opening in January 1924, Rothenstein was keen to appoint the mercurial Jacob Epstein, another artist he had supported financially, to the vacancy. It was a controversial choice and a battle he lost, but not before a tour of art schools in Paris, Prague and Berlin had suggested ideas for further change at the RCA.¹⁵

1.2
Paul Nash, Meeting Place, Buntingford, wood engraving, 1921.
One of eight images cut for Places, 1923.

Increasingly conservative in his own creative instincts (he regarded abstract art as ‘a cardinal heresy’),¹⁶ Rothenstein was nevertheless radically ambitious when he engaged in any venture. A freedom he had secured from the Board was the ability to appoint practising artists as visiting part-timers; he also wanted to enliven an area that for all its inherited arts and crafts strengths exhibited ‘a somewhat doctrinaire pedantry of pseudo-medieval character’.¹⁷ Nash had given a lecture at South Kensington and had previously been teaching a day a fortnight at the Cornmarket Art School in Oxford, alternating with Rothenstein’s brother Albert Rutherston as instructor to the ‘sons of dons and daughters of professors’ in the rudiments of wood engraving’.¹⁸ As Bawden recalled, Nash now appeared in Exhibition Road ‘at the right moment, and what is more, he came into the Design School, the habitat of the lowest of the low’. For those already looking to life beyond College, it was an inspired move destined to inspire.

***

1.3
RCA Convocation 18 July 1924.
Top left: Ravilious, Bliss to his right, drapes a hand over the student in front.
Seated from right: Robert Anning Bell, William Rothenstein and Sir Frank Short.

The group of friends that would emerge from the RCA to enliven England’s art and design in the 1930s began to coalesce on Wednesday 27 Sept...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Authors
• Other Titles of Interest
• Contents
• A Star in his Firmament
• 1 South Kensington
• 2 Earls Court and Eastbourne
• 3 London and Metropolitan
• 4 Brick House
• 5 Furlongs
• 6 Newhaven
• 7 Paris and Mayfair
• 8 Bristol and Rye
• 9 To Iceland
• Aftermath
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Image credits
• Index
• Copyright