Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Carriage trade: Train Landscape (1939), Wedgwood ‘Garden’ pattern dinnerware design and Elizabeth II coronation mug

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU EXTRAORDINARY EVERYDAY: THE ART & DESIGN OF ERIC RAVILIOUS The Arc, Winchester, to 15th May

‘Cheerfulness kept creeping in,’ the artist Douglas Percy Bliss said. That is one of the reasons his friend Eric Ravilious (1903-42) is so warmly regarded.

Another is his ability to see beauty in everything. Despite the general absence of humans in much of his work – those who do appear are slightly surreal – he gives humanity and a mystical spirituality to his subject matter: not just machinery or domestic interiors, but even the Downs with their chalk figures.

Ravilious was making his name as a wood-engraver and designer when he told Helen Binyon that his ‘greatest ambition was to revive the English tradition of watercolour painting’. He succeeded.

In a 1939 exhibition review, Jan Gordon, himself a watercolour painter, said Ravilious’s works, ‘by a combination of unexpected selection, exactly apt colour and an almost prestidigitous watercolour technique and textural variety, appear as something magic, almost mystic, distilled out of the ordinary everyday’.

There have been a number of Ravilious exhibitions so far this century. Several, including the very popular 2015 show at Dulwich, were curated by the authoritative James Russell. Here he is again. Instead of concentrating on one aspect of Ravilious’s career, he gives due weight to design, printmaking, landscape and war work.

Even though Ravilious died in 1942, his clear, clean designs for Wedgwood have become emblematic of the midcentury decades. The Coronation mug intended for Edward VIII in 1936 was quickly recycled for his brother, and again for his niece in 1953. Similarly, Ravilious was quite at home at the Festival of Britain.

The combination of his skills produced a technique that didn’t just build on the great past of the watercolour school, but advanced it – probably more than did his friends the Nash brothers, Bawden and Piper. Laura Cumming has called him ‘the Seurat of Sussex’, and his watercolours have a grainy pointillism carried over from wood-engraving.

Light, often silvery – unlike the blaze of Samuel Palmer – is a principal ingredient. His everyday things are given a ‘faery’ sheen. By contrast to John Piper’s ‘bad luck with the weather’ when he was working at Windsor Castle for George VI, Ravilious’s wartime watercolours dazzle.