ERIC RAVILIOUS’S HELICOPTER

Art

Gustav Temple heads for the Sussex hills in search of the landscape of Eric Ravilious

h, Ravilious! He really did make rather

Alovely tea towels, didn’t he? If you happen to live in Eric’s stamping ground of East Sussex, you cannot escape from his imagery. Every gift shop in Lewes is bursting with Ravilious prints, postcards, tote bags, fridge magnets and tea towels. The latter is particularly ironic as, by all accounts, he didn’t keep his kitchen very tidy. And he only popped into Lewes once, in the 1930s, to grab some antique chairs from a junk shop and haul them back on the train to Furlongs, a house near Glynde occupied by fellow artist Peggy Angus.

Angus lived in rustic splendour in this tumbledown cottage in the middle of nowhere, with no electricity, gas or running water. It became the artistic hub of a group of painters, printmakers and ceramicists, some of whom would go on to be seen as the key players in the emergence of British modernism. Charleston House, a furlong or two away across the Downs, was home to another artistic circle centred around Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Peggy Angus once spotted Woolf wafting past Furlongs, but contact between the two groups was never established, the Charleston set, apparently, being more likely to discuss problems with the servants than what shade of green best captured Mount Caburn. It was essentially a class division, the Ravilious set being more ruggedly bohemian and given to midnight nude dancing than the Bells and Grants. While Virginia Woolf complained to the district council about the new cement works that spoiled her view, Ravilious and Angus were delighted by them and made frequent visits to paint them.

Eric’s idea of a nice day out was to stand for hours in the rain on a bleak spot on the Sussex Downs, capturing the essence of the landscape in an original way that would end up on thousands of tea towels. If a tea towel were ever used at Furlongs, it would have been to wipe the paint of a brush.

Because I live in the shadow of the Sussex Downs, and because lockdown gives one many extra hours to fill, I felt it my duty to go forth and discover how much the subjects of some of Ravilious’s paintings had changed since the 1930s. Others had had the same idea, and I was even given a convenient map drawn by eccentric neopagan vicar Peter Owen-Jones, showing the way to Furlongs from the railway station at Glynde, a prosperous hamlet near the famous opera house.

The 30-minute-walk to Furlongs takes one deep into Ravilious country, as a book of his paintings clutched along the way confirmed. In order to reach his view of Mount Caburn, much mud was to be negotiated, plus the crossing of a dual carriageway that wasn’t there in Eric’s day.

Furlongs is immediately recognisable for its distinctive single and double chimneys and a neat little walled garden at the back. However, my attemps to capture by camera the actual view Ravilious painted proved impossible, and it became

clear that he had taken a spot of artistic licence, by painting a view of the garden that would only be visible by helicopter. This turned out to be the case with several other views that should have matched his paintings. The blighter had only gone and cheated by going several steps further than mere representation. Bloody modernists!

The current occupier of Furlongs cast suspicious glances through her window as I snapped away on the road outside. I waved the large book of Ravilious reproductions at her by way of explanation. Upon departing the house down the lane, I suddenly saw another view that looked familiar: Furlongs as painted by Peggy Angus herself (above). Angus is sadly overlooked, in the shadow of her more famous houseguests, who also included Edward Bawden and John Nash. She produced an enormous body of work herself, including paintings, prints, wallpaper and tiles; there are several secondary schools in England that still bear entire walls of her beautiful tiles, and a single Angus tile occasionally surfaces on eBay, priced roughly the same as she would have been paid for the entire commission in the 1940s.

Peggy Angus was the fulcrum for the entire movement, providing not only accommodation and inspiration, but also a haven for Eric’s naughty shenanigans with Helen Binyon, with whom he conducted a five-year secret affair. The other person that linked them all was Paul Nash, whom the group had been lucky enough to have as a tutor for three months at the Royal College of Art in the 1920s. This would be like having Tracy Emin as one’s tutor today, but less annoying. Nash is seen as one of the most important landscape painters of the first half of the 20th century, and his official war paintings from the First World War are some of the most famous depictions of the conflict.

Nash was also big on applied art, something viewed with disdain by the European surrealist and cubist painters of the period. Picasso might have enjoyed painting set decoration for Diaghilev’s ballets, but he would have baulked at making wallpaper. Paul Nash encouraged all his students to learn skills other than painting, not simply for their equally laudable aesthetic value, but also so that they could earn a decent living as artists. The fact that Peggy Angus and co all scraped a living from public commissions for murals, tiles, book jackets and home decor contributed to their lack of recognition on the international sphere, at least until more recently.

At the end of the lane from Furlongs, we encountered an old boy taking a stroll, who

“Eric’s idea of a nice day out was to stand for hours in the rain on the Sussex Downs, capturing the landscape in an original way that would end up on thousands of tea towels. If a tea towel were ever used at Furlongs, it would have been to wipe the paint off a brush”

stopped for a chat when we revealed our grand artistic mission. “I once did some work at Furlongs in the eighties,” quoth he, “for an old lady who lived there. When I was digging in the garden I kept finding bits of old tiles.” I didn’t want to ruin this priceless memory by mentioning how much he would have got for them on eBay, so we bid him farewell and continued our exploration of Ravilious country, enjoying the possibility that there was now just one degree of separation between us and Peggy Angus.

Next stop, this time by motor car, was Cuckmere Haven, a dramatic network of flooded rivers and oxbow lakes leading down to the sea near Beachy Head. After several attempts at different points along the highest point of the cliffs, it proved impossible to capture in a photograph the same view as Ravilious’s painting. Once again, he seemed to have used a helicopter. He had also omitted a pair of coastguard cottages on the horizon, which I later discovered were built in 1820 (film fans might care to know that they feature in the 2007 film Atonement). Maybe Eric had a vision

Art

of the future, for unless enough money can be raised to build a proper sea defence, the cottages will slide off the cliffs within a few years.

The final leg of the journey was to the Long Man of Wilmington, which Ravilious painted in 1939. The Long Man was originally thought to have dated from the Neolithic period, but subsequent scholars have dated it more closely to the early 18th century. Making these little journeys by car made me realise what effort Ravilious had gone to. On the first trip to Wilmington a heavy fog descended, covering the Long Man in a blanket of white. Again, the precise view painted by Eric was not possible to capture, and this had nothing to do with urban development as the area is protected from that sort of thing. The barbed wire fence (a favourite motif of his) that aesthetically frames the chalk carving is no longer there (or was it ever?) and Eric seems to have been painting it while leaning uncomfortably to the right.

Exploring the living subject matter of artists is certainly an immersive way to appreciate their work. Capturing the mimicked photograph is more difficult that imagined, and each one leads to further exploration in books and the internet to find out more about each composition. I wouldn’t recommend it with the works of Tracy Emin, though. n

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