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拍品專文
Originally titled Hill Farm, this soaring watercolour was one of a group painted by Eric Ravilious in early 1938, during a six-week stay in the Welsh borders, and subsequently exhibited at Tooth and Sons the following year. He had first seen Capel-y-Ffin, a village in the Honddu valley, portrayed in the watercolours of Anglo-Welsh artist and poet David Jones, who had lived there with Eric Gill in the 1920s. On arrival Ravilious found the wintry colours of the landscape ideal (the hills covered in ‘flocks of David Jones’ sheep’) but the weather less so. When the rain let up he was forced to wear two waistcoats and two overcoats against the biting wind, yet he still produced half a dozen fine watercolours.
Ravilious had painted very little over the previous two years, but The Causeway, Wiltshire Downs (1937, Victoria and Albert Museum) suggests a desire to explore country more dramatic than Sussex. Given that the same period had also seen considerable emotional upheaval, involving the near-collapse of his marriage and the end of his long affair with Helen Binyon, he may also have been looking for solitude. This he certainly found. Aside from a memorable visit from John and Myfanwy Piper, almost his only human contact was with the Saunders, the English family who put him up at their farmhouse in the village.
It is a simplified version of this house that we see towards the bottom left of this watercolour, which was painted from a vantage point a little way down the valley. The distinctive hill beyond evidently appealed to Ravilious as strongly as it had to Jones, who used its Welsh name, Y-Twmpa (The Tump). To the English it was known colloquially as Lord Hereford’s Knob, which Ravilious apparently misremembered in titling another Capel watercolour The Duke of Hereford’s Knob. Given the time of year it is unlikely that the rows of triangular shapes in the foreground represent cornstalks. Perhaps instead these are the piles of bracken that Ravilious helped gather up and burn in great bonfires.
This was a change of scene in every sense and it did the trick, Ravilious writing to Helen Binyon on his return home, ‘I feel almost a different person.’ Over the following year he would paint the watercolours that cemented his reputation, and here one can feel both his pleasure in experiencing such a remarkable place, and a renewed delight in his craft.
James Russell is compiling the catalogue raisonné of watercolours by Eric Ravilious, to be published as Eric Ravilious: the Complete Watercolours by The Hedingham Press. For information, please visit hedinghampress.co.uk.
Ravilious had painted very little over the previous two years, but The Causeway, Wiltshire Downs (1937, Victoria and Albert Museum) suggests a desire to explore country more dramatic than Sussex. Given that the same period had also seen considerable emotional upheaval, involving the near-collapse of his marriage and the end of his long affair with Helen Binyon, he may also have been looking for solitude. This he certainly found. Aside from a memorable visit from John and Myfanwy Piper, almost his only human contact was with the Saunders, the English family who put him up at their farmhouse in the village.
It is a simplified version of this house that we see towards the bottom left of this watercolour, which was painted from a vantage point a little way down the valley. The distinctive hill beyond evidently appealed to Ravilious as strongly as it had to Jones, who used its Welsh name, Y-Twmpa (The Tump). To the English it was known colloquially as Lord Hereford’s Knob, which Ravilious apparently misremembered in titling another Capel watercolour The Duke of Hereford’s Knob. Given the time of year it is unlikely that the rows of triangular shapes in the foreground represent cornstalks. Perhaps instead these are the piles of bracken that Ravilious helped gather up and burn in great bonfires.
This was a change of scene in every sense and it did the trick, Ravilious writing to Helen Binyon on his return home, ‘I feel almost a different person.’ Over the following year he would paint the watercolours that cemented his reputation, and here one can feel both his pleasure in experiencing such a remarkable place, and a renewed delight in his craft.
James Russell is compiling the catalogue raisonné of watercolours by Eric Ravilious, to be published as Eric Ravilious: the Complete Watercolours by The Hedingham Press. For information, please visit hedinghampress.co.uk.