Footnotes

Provenance
The Artist, from whom acquired by
Douglas Percy Bliss, thence by descent to the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, St George's Gallery, September-October 1927, cat.no.13
London, Hayward Gallery (catalogue untraced)

The present work illuminates a pivotal year of the artist's career with an insightful clarity. Executed in 1924, The Red House came right at the cusp of his graduation from the Royal College of Art, from which he would embark on a travelling scholarship to Italy. He had been under the tutelage of Paul Nash for about a year by this stage and was well on the way to a mastery of woodblock engraving – both formative, related elements that can be seen clearly here.

Some of the stylistic and applicational techniques Nash developed in his watercolours had a direct influence on Ravilious in this period, and would continue to exert a pull on the direction of his work in the coming decade. Visible here is a variety in the concentration of pigment, a skill Ravilious took to superb levels, injecting a great textural range to the image that can otherwise be more difficult to achieve in watercolour than oil. Deep, flat planes of colour in front of the fence, to parts of the brickwork and in topographical layers in the background are interspersed by sparser, almost scraped areas of paint. Also reminiscent of Nash are the trees – skeletal, linear and with simplified, angular clumps of branches crowding together (for a comparison, see Paul Nash's Early Spring, Fulmer 1919 (sold in these salerooms on 20 November 2024 for £95,000).

The two shared a great love of another medium that fed into their innovation in watercolour: woodblock engraving. In the case of Ravilious, this was in part a result of the leaning towards design and more decorative art that was pervasive at the R.C.A. at the time, and in fact inspired its initial formation in 1837. The key impact this would have on Ravilious's work was, once more, in his ability to create a visual depth through texture. His use of scratches and tight, linear brushwork can be seen particularly in the sky, and it comes directly from his work in woodblock engraving. Similar parallels in the structure of his brushwork have been drawn with carving, a parallel epitomised by his time shared in Florence with Henry Moore, with "the scaffolding strokes, each clearly identifiable, doing the work of representation but creating at the same time a parallel structure of design within the picture" (Alan Powers, Eric Ravilious: Artist & Designer, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2013, p.17).

Another, more indirect impact is that the emphasis on repetitive pattern and on design as an ideal lead to a keen sense of the multiplicity of focal points that the artist would replicate regularly across his career in watercolour. Here, we have competing, diverging focal points – the doorway to the titular red house and the sparsely detailed figure coming out of the picture plane towards the lower left – the two connected by the fence line that leads the eye directly from whichever it falls on first to the other.

These more complex, technical methods are complimented by a whimsical, dreamlike quality to the artist's work. He was described by a peer at the Eastbourne School of Art as someone who "always seemed to be slightly somewhere else, as if he lived a private life which did not completely coincide with material existence" (Op.Cit., p.11). Appropriately, while touring Siena, Florence and the Tuscan hillside towns, Ravilious reportedly spent more time walking around in the fresh air taking in the atmosphere and the architectural beauty than he did studiously prowling the galleries and cathedrals, as was the convention. This sense of dreamlike wonder was retained throughout, and contributes perhaps more than anything else to the idiosyncratic, charismatic and expressive style that makes Ravilious's work so recognisable and enchanting.