Eric Ravilious - Observer's Post

Eric Ravilious (1903-1942), Observer's Post, 1939-40, © Trustees of the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery (The Higgins Bedford)

In the Higgins Bedford collection we have one precious Eric Ravilious watercolour, Observer’s Post from around 1939. If things were different you would have been able to see it in the 'Under the Same Sky' exhibition that was due to open in April. You would have walked into a gallery past works by William Holman Hunt and Ceri Richards in oak frames on dark blue walls. There might have been a family sitting in the armchairs to your right, reading aloud underneath canvas floating clouds. You would find the Ravilious in a section about the sun, next to a watercolour by Samuel Palmer. In a caption holder on its right, there would be paragraphs I wrote a couple of months ago when I was sitting in an office a few floors above. This will all happen, we just have to wait.

Until then, the Ravilious remains safely hanging on the metal racking in the dark Art Store. It has been hanging in the different incarnations of the Cecil Higgins art store since 1958 when it was bought on the advice of the gallery's art advisor, Ronald Alley (1926-1999), former Keeper of the Modern Collection at Tate Gallery. The previous year, Alley had made a list of artists to direct the gallery on the artworks they should be working to acquire. Ravilious’ name was included on the list, with a note saying ‘very scarce’. It seems, therefore, that they were very lucky to find ‘The Observer’s Post’ at the Redfern Gallery, London, the following April. 

Ravilious had painted the watercolour twenty years earlier. At the outbreak of war he had volunteered for the Observers Corps, ‘the eyes and ears of the RAF’. In the autumn of 1939 he spent his nights at a Post on the top of a hill near his village home in Castle Headingham, Essex identifying and reporting the movements of planes in the sky above. He paints the post at the end of his shift as the dawn sun, with a great yellow aura, rises. 

Ravilious was made an Official War Artist the following year, a scheme set up not only to record the war in art, but also to save a generation of artists from dying. It didn’t save Ravilious though, he died in Iceland in 1942. A search plane he was on failed to return and his body was never recovered. He was only 39 and this may be why Alley marked his work as ‘scarce’ - his career was cut so painfully short. 

The Art Store at The Higgins Bedford at the time of closure. Observer’s Post is below Edward Bawden’s Brighton Pier.

I always hang ‘Observer’s Post’ in the art store with a work by Edward Bawden for company. The two were best friends from their first day at the Royal College of Art, lived together with their wives in Great Bardfield and remained close throughout their life. Bawden didn’t find out about his friend’s death for four months as he was imprisoned in a Casablanca internment camp after his ship was torpedoed while returning home. When Bawden learned of his friend's death, he wrote to Ravilious’s widow Tirzah ‘I simply can’t tell you, or anyone else, or even myself what it is, or how much it is I miss by losing Eric’.

Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious in happier times working together on a mural at Morley College in 1930.

Written by Victoria Partridge, Keeper of Fine and Decorative Art