Kettle, Teapot, Breadboard, Matches dates to 1939 when Ravilious was at the very height of his powers, working at Aldeburgh, and in Wales, and the south of France, preparing works for his third one-man show, which was held at the Arthur Tooth & Sons Gallery in 1939. In the same year he produced his celebrated series of watercolours of chalk hill figures in the English landscape, (Tate, the Victoria & Albert Museum and Aberdeen Art Gallery).
Unique in Ravilious’s oeuvre, Kettle, Teapot, Breadboard, Matches is Ravilious’s only still life – and one of his most celebrated images. It is a culmination of the aesthetic he developed for Wedgwood, in iconographic designs such as the Alphabet mug (1937), and his celebrated china sets Afternoon Tea (1938), and Garden Implements (1939).
Founded in 1936 by Cecilia Dunbar-Kilburn (1903-1984) and Athole Hay (1901-1938), Dunbar Hay was created as a marriage bureau for promising young designers (mostly Royal College of Art graduates) and industry. It closed on the onset of WW2; its stock and records were subsequently destroyed by bombing.
Kettle, Teapot, Breadboard, Matches is the most significant surviving work from Ravilious collaboration with Dunbar Hay.
‘Tirzah says she would like to embroider the design of mine I sent to Lucy Norton, as she does no marbling now. I’d love to see it done, and I believe Tirzah would make a good job of it. Do you think Lucy would send her the design? Just the thing for the ‘duration’, hateful word!’
(Ravilious at War: The Complete Works of Eric Ravilious September 1939 – 1942’: Edited by Anne Ullmann, with a forward by Brian Sewell).
Owing to the war the design was never reworked.
The watercolour later became a prize possession of Edward Bawden, most of whose collection came onto the market in the 1970, and the majority of which was acquired by Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, and the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden. Kettle, Teapot, Breadboard, Matches was given, however, to Ravilious’ daughter, Anne Ullmann, who has always believed it to be one of his finest works.
Letter from Edward Bawden to Anne Ullmann, daughter of Eric Ravilious
Sketch for the painting in Eric’s Scrapbook at the Fry