A BREATH OF FRESH AIR
ERIC RAVILIOUS
EDWARD BAWDEN
DOUGLAS PERCY BLISS
5– 21 DECEMBER 2007
The Fine Art Society is proud to present an exhibition of work by Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden and Douglas Percy Bliss from 5 December - 21 December 2007.
Eighty years ago in September 1927 the St George’s Gallery in London mounted an exhibition of paintings and engravings by Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden and Douglas Percy Bliss, three recent graduates of the Royal College of Art who had become close friends there. Our exhibition reunites the trio with paintings and prints from the period in the 1920’s when they were inseparable, and also includes later works.
They entered the Royal College of Art in 1922. The years 1921-22 were a special vintage and included Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Edward Burra, John Tunnard, Bartnett Freedman, Phyllis Dodd, Enid Marx, Peggy Angus, Helen Binyon, Raymond Coxon, Percy Horton and Vivian Pitchforth. These artists and designers were to have a profound impact on British art.
Ravilious, Bawden and Bliss formed a close circle and in the next few years they shared homes, studios, and worked and exhibited together. They were an unlikely partnership, Ravilious the brilliant charmer, Bawden taciturn and shy, Bliss the intellectual and their senior by two years. The exhibition includes contemporary portraits of the three by their fellow student Phyllis Dodd, who married Bliss in 1928. She was beautiful, talented and William Rotherstein, the newly appointed principal of the RCA, considered her one of the best students.
They arrived at the Royal College of Art by different routes: Ravilious on a scholarship from Eastbourne School of Art was one of three children, born in Acton, West London. Bawden was an only child, born in Braintree, Essex, and won a scholarship form Cambridge. Bliss was born in Karachi. His father moved his family to Edinburgh University. He graduated with an MA in English Literature and a medal for Art History. In a year with many talented and brilliant students, the three still stood out.
Bliss was born in 1900, Ravilious and Bawden in 1903. They were students at a time when there was a division between those young men who had personal experience from the First World War and those who, being too young to be conscripted, had escaped. Their contemporaries would become pioneers in British abstraction and surrealism, bu the three young artists worked consistently in the figurative tradition and developed a style which combined strong, yet elegant draughtsmanship with a dry watercolour technique close to that of Paul Nash, who taught them at the Royal College of Art. The subject matter they chose was largely taken from the scene around them. They sought the unusual and the quirky, or transformed a commonplace view with wit, style and humour. They read voraciously. Literature brought them ideas and inspiration. It also provided direct influence on their work as they received commissions from publishers and private presses to illustrate texts.
The modern world and the machine age were present in their work, but only as it suited their artistic purposes. Both Ravilious and Bawden were in the Design School at the Royal College of Art and were to become designers as well as painters, working with industrial and commercial companies. Bliss was in the painting school and it was as artists rather than designers, that they first made their mark. Bliss and Ravilious attended Frank Short’s Saturday morning engraving sessions for non-specialists. Short was not impressed bv their engraved or written work. When they took the exam at the end of their course, he failed them both: Bliss for his comtemporary ideas and Ravilious for not realising that there were questions on both sides of the paper. Oxford University Press thought highly of Bliss as a wood engraver when he took his illustrations of the Border Ballads which he had selected, to show them. They published them in 1925. Bliss went on to write A History of Wood Engraving, published in 1928. Bawden and Ravilious were the top students in the design school and it was arranged that they should not compete for the travelling scholarship to Italy. Ravilious was awarded it first in 1924 and Bawden the following year.
Paul Nash joined the staff at the Royal College of Art as a part-time tutor and he encouraged the students to approach galleries in the West End of London. Ravilious had work at the Redfern Gallery and Bliss was offered an exhibition of watercolours at the St George’s Gallery, to be shared with two other artists. Naturally he suggested his best friends. Ravilious went to Sussex to make paintings for the show and then joined Bawden in Braintree where he was already at work; Bliss went to the Hebrides. WaterColours by Edward Bawden, Douglas Percy Bliss, Eric Ravilious, took place in September 1927, and was the only exhibition during their lifetimes to show work by all three artists.
Gordon Cooke
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DOUGLAS PERCY BLISS
Detail from The Gamekeeper, 1934
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