Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War

At first glance the paintings of Eric Ravilious are cheerful. Bright and airy landscapes, soft hills, the still life of an afternoon tea, chalk figures seen through the window of a railway carriage; all with a straight-edged exactness which brought order to the world he was depicting. Only when the eye lingers on his bright watercolours does something darker emerge. For Alan Bennett, these paintings were not just depicting a moment in history, or serving as propaganda, but framing what is to be English. 

Bennett is one of many figures from the arts interviewed in Margy Kinmonth’s documentary, Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War (2022). Like Bennett, nature writer Robert Macfarlane was drawn to, and drew from, the paintings’ Englishness, an aspect not necessarily intended by Ravilious himself. MacFarlane claims the paintings were ‘pre-nationalist’, referring in particular to one of the most famous works: the cliffs of Dover with Beachey Head light house shining into a dark sea, a puff of black cloud just visible.

Curators also feature in the documentary, hailing Ravilious as one of Britain’s major artists; a central thesis of the film.

But it is Ravilious’s descendants who tell the story of the man; a story of gradual discovery and piecing together. After his children found a cache of his paintings under a bed in the late 1970s they gradually brought them to the art world’s attention. A trove of letters to fellow artist and wife, Tirzah, form the backbone of the documentary’s narrative.

Tirzah’s work is exceptional yet never reached the audience of Eric’s. The film does not dwell on this, however, but does dwell on one of Tirzah’s paintings entitled The Wife, depicting a woman sat up in a double bed, alone.

Ravilious left home for work: when the war began in 1939 he was commissioned as a war artist. His postings took him to places he’d never otherwise have visited: Norway, Scapa Flow, the Isle of May and (to a groan from the Dundonian audience when I watched it) ‘Dundee in Fife’, all of which put him in situations he’d never otherwise have known: aircraft carriers lighting up the sky with their guns, a naval flotilla heading back to port, a light ship at night. These leave us with startling images which – even in wartime and as a commissioned war artist – still foreground the lightness of landscape with only hints of his trademark darkness.

My favourite images in Drawn to War were of submariners busily going about their work, seemingly unaware of Ravilious sketching them with the same neatness he rendered the Sussex and Wiltshire landscape. It was like an artist being sent into space, able to convey something very human about the sometimes terrifying, often mundane, lives of the seamen; and producing scenes we would otherwise never see.  

In 1942 Ravilious was sent to Iceland. Opting to join an airborne search mission for a downed aircraft, he flew over the country’s spare landscapes and coast, arctic convoys passing beneath, the sea thick with German U-boats. Whatever scribbles of Iceland he started or imagined we will never know: the aircraft’s engines failed and it plunged into the sea, killing all onboard.

But what is left is a host of images, all of which are somehow recognisable, perhaps because they do form a foundation of Englishness, and which Drawn to War does a fine job of reminding us were painted by one Eric Ravilious during his short but prolific life.   

Available Online at https://www.dartmouthfilms.com/eric-ravilious-drawn-to-war