On Loan
Eric Ravilious
(1903 - 1942)
Hampden Park, 1925
On Loan
Eric Ravilious (1903 - 1942)
Size:
Height – 39cm
Width – 52cm
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 one of Ravilious’s only still lives – 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.
Sketch for the painting in Eric’s Scrapbook at the Fry
Born in London he studied at the Eastbourne School of Art and at The Royal College of Art under Paul Nash, where Edward Bawden became a close friend. Initially a muralist (none of which has survived), he became widely known for his luminous watercolours, woodcuts, lithographs ‘ notably his High Street Shops executed by the Curwen Press, (published by Country Life in 1938 in a book with a text by JM Richards, husband of Peggy Angus), ceramics for Wedgewood and graphics for London Transport, as well as glass and furniture design. Much inspired by the South Downs in East Sussex, he was a frequent visitor to Furlongs, the cottage of the artist Peggy Angus. In 1930 he married fellow artist ‘Tirzah’ Garwood, they then moved to rural Essex, at first sharing a house with the Bawdens. An official World War II artist and with a commission with the Royal Marines, he died while with an RAF air sea rescue mission to Iceland. His works are in the collections of numerous British museums and art galleries, the largest holding is at the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne.
Selected Literature: Alan Powers, Eric Ravillious: Imagined Realities, Imperial War Museum, London, 2003.
