The painter of the path
Step through the frame and into the South Downs of Eric Ravilious.
PRING, 1934. A London train wheezes into Glynde Station, hissing steam into the cool Sussex air. Three passengers alight: one is the handsome, dark-haired figure of Eric Ravilious. Laden with rucksacks, paints and easels, they make tracks for a secluded cottage called ‘Furlongs’ at the foot of the South Downs. Ahead of them, Beddingham Hill billows into the picture. Ravilious is spellbound.
‘Furlongs altered my whole outlook and way of painting,’ he later wrote. ‘The colour of the landscape was so lovely and the design so beautifully obvious.’
Ranked among the foremost British watercolourists of the 20th century, Eric Ravilious produced unique and evocative images of southern England’s chalk hills. The downs around Lewes were his favourite muse, providing the simple lines, subtle light and abstract perspectives which characterise his work. The landscape was as much a tool of his trade as the brushes he used.
Born in 1903, Ravilious grew up in Eastbourne where his father ran an antique shop, but he rediscovered his ‘own country’ when he and his wife stayed at Furlongs in 1934. Frequent return trips would shape his work until his untimely death in the Second World War. He painted a changing world, juxtaposing old and new, natural with manmade. A lifelong walker of old ways, his eye was often drawn to the chalk paths etched across the downs. Robert Macfarlane has called him ‘the great painter of the path’. Now as then, they lead up, over and into the shapes, colours and open spaces that excited and inspired him. Paths into pictures It’s a crisp winter morning when I set off in Ravilious’s footsteps. I feel like I’m walking into Chalk Paths – the eye-leading, pulls-you-in picture on my wall that tempted me out here. Drained of their summer zest, the downs are bleached pale shades of green and brown. As in the painting, the languid sunlight gives a stark clarity to their bare, rounded slopes.
Off at dawn, Ravilious painted the South Downs in every season, but preferred this time of year for its muted palette and soft, dreamy light. Unlike Rav (as chums knew him), I get a side-on view of the downs as I tramp slowly up Beddingham Hill from the west. Climbing away from Southease Station and the River Ouse, the South Downs Way curls across Itford Hill. Underfoot, a greasy chalk track gives way to sheep-nibbled turf. Where I top out, the downs’ crimped and shadowy scarp drops away to my left, spilling north into the Weald. The dip slope melts south towards Newhaven and the grey sea, like a bedsheet rippling in a breeze.
“He painted a changing world, juxtaposing old and new… his eye was often drawn to the chalk paths etched across the downs.”
At the time of Ravilious’s sorties onto the South Downs, interwar England was obsessed by this ancient and beautiful landscape, which drew artists, archaeologists and ramblers from far and wide. Hemmed in by the modern world, its paths were portals to the past. The downs promised freedom and echoed the period’s art deco aesthetics.
“The downs had this wonderful quality of being very old and also very modern” explains James Russell, an art historian and curator who’s compiling the catalogue raissonné of Ravilious’s watercolours. “They’re very smooth and uncluttered, and had a simplicity he could almost sculpt with.”
Well-versed in the literature of the downs, Ravilious admired the writings of Edward Thomas and Gilbert White. He adored the watercolours of Samuel Palmer, who painted the North Downs around Shoreham in Kent a century earlier. While a student at the Eastbourne School of Art, he took long walks across their southern sisters. On one such adventure, he trekked up the River Adur and down the Arun, sleeping in barns overnight.
In 1922, Ravilious won a scholarship to study design at London’s Royal College of Art. Tutored by the war artist Paul Nash, he emerged as a talented illustrator and wood-engraver. While there, he also struck up a close friendship with Edward Bawden and met his wife-to-be Tirzah Garwood. After graduating, he briefly returned to Eastbourne to teach part-time, often leading pupils on sketching expeditions across the downs.
During the early 1930s Ravilious and Tirzah resided in London and Essex. But in 1934, they were invited to stay at the shepherd’s cottage
in the South Downs rented by their college friend Peggy Angus. Furlongs became the bijou home-from-home for a bohemian set of artists and designers, who embraced a simple lifestyle, free from formality. They walked the downs for leisure, but for sketching and painting, Ravilious would rarely stray far from the cottage.
Striding east along the brow of the downs, I pass Red Lion Pond, a mile uphill from Furlongs. This now parched dew pond once collected water for livestock to drink, in the days when it couldn’t be piped up. Everywhere I look, I see the downland paraphernalia Ravilious liked to paint: rulerstraight strands of barbed wire, hillsides scored with sheep trods and scraggly hawthorns slicked back by the wind. A rusty field roller recreates Ravilious’s Downs in Winter.
Ravilious could make everyday scenes extraordinary, but he also painted famous landmarks and chalk figures, like the Wilmington Giant and the white horses of Wessex. Nearer to Eastbourne, he produced striking images of Beachy Head and Cuckmere Haven. Despite their rural settings and often antiquated subjects, there’s nothing rose-tinted about Ravilious’s pictures. The washed-out colours, cross-hatched textures and flowing forms of nature contrast with bold manmade lines: telegraph wires, fences and ploughed fields.
If Ravilious were around today, he would probably paint the radio masts on Beddingham Hill. Ahead of me, their tapered steel frames break the monotony of the downland desert, probing the pastel-blue sky. Ravilious looked for shapes and objects that primed his imagination. People rarely feature – and only as crude, faceless figures. But sometimes, a human presence is palpable.
“It’s as if there has been or could be somebody there” says Russell. “It’s all about the design of the picture and the way your eye is moved around.”
I press on following shallow, chalky ruts up to the high point of Firle Beacon, pockmarked with prehistoric tumuli. From this vantage point I turn northwest to see the outlying dome of Mount Caburn, chipped on one side by a chalk pit. The industry of the downs fascinated Ravilious. While at Furlongs, he and Peggy often painted the cement works down the lane at Asham. Others were not so enthusiastic about this dirty blot on the landscape – not least the novelist Virginia Woolf, who’d earlier moved across the Ouse to Rodmell.
“Ravilious was at his most successful when he stepped away from nature and focussed on the
manmade,” says Russell. “When he started his downland pieces, he was looking at nature, but stepping away from it. He used the place, but created something entirely artificial from his own imagination. That’s what made him a tremendously exciting artist.”
Ravilious was a perfectionist: inspired by a first impression, he would finish pictures months later, working from notes and sketches. Curiously, Train Landscape (the Westbury White Horse, seen from a third class compartment) combines the best parts of different paintings. Ravilious was dissatisfied with the original versions, so Tirzah cut out Wiltshire’s white horse from one and glued it into the place of Sussex’s Wilmington Giant.
Before reaching the disused chalk pit above Bo Peep Farm, I turn down a chalk bostal slinking beneath Firle Beacon. It carves across the face of the downs to the stony, potholed byway along the bottom – the Old Coach Road from Lewes to Alfriston. This medieval road was bypassed by the present A27. Puddles of ice crack like glass under my boots as I follow it west towards the village of Firle.
Across the fields I can make out Charleston Farm, where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant hosted the various other writers, thinkers and artists of the Bloomsbury Group. Ravilious and his friends could well have passed Virginia Woolf or E.M. Forster in the lane, but the two creative circles never mingled, despite their Sussex retreats being so close.
Rounding the estate walls of Firle Place, I turn down the pretty village street, lined with typical downland cottages built in flint, brick and russetred tiles. A footpath across freshly-ploughed fields leads to Little Dene and the tree-lined lane Ravilious would have walked many times on trips to Furlongs. He walked it for the last time in August 1939, shortly before war was declared.
In December that year, Ravilious accepted a commission as a war artist. He initially painted dockyard scenes and coastal defences, but later joined HMS Highlander as it sailed for the Arctic Circle. This perilous voyage fed Ravilious’s lifelong desire to see the mountains and polar wilds of the far north. These icy otherworlds were not entirely dissimilar to the haunting downscapes he had rushed out to paint whenever snow came to Sussex. In late August 1942, he gleefully embarked on a posting to RAF Kaldadarnes in Iceland. Within a few days of his arrival, he joined the crew of a Lockheed Hudson on a search and rescue mission, but the aircraft never returned. Ravilious was declared missing in action.
His fate and legacy give me pause for thought as I pass the turnoff for Furlongs and walk the bostal back over Beddingham Hill. This track was paved after Ravilious’s time here, but the flow of paths and curve of the hill bear a striking resemblance to his concrete-free Chalk Paths. The wire fence, chalk pit and skeletal trees match up. But painting and reality diverge somewhere in the background. Perhaps this was the spot that inspired the picture.
Charming yet uncanny, Eric Ravilious’s watercolours distil the beguiling character of the South Downs. Walking in his footsteps, you begin to see the landscape as he did: shapely, strange and beautiful.