‘Sharp in detail, clean in colour'

Known as ‘the boy’ and only 39 when he died on active service in the Second World War, Eric Ravilious had already accomplished so much, thanks to his fastidious eye for mundane detail

- Peyton Skipwith

ON September 5, 1942, Tirzah Ravilious received a letter from the Admiralty informing her that her husband ‘Temporary Captain Eric Ravilious, Royal Marines, has been reported missing since Wednesday last, September 2, 1942, when the aircraft in which he was a passenger failed to return from a patrol’. Seven months later (March 17, 1943), she received another letter, this time from his fellow artist Edward Bawden: ‘No one I know or have known seems to possess what he had, an almost flawless taste… But my dear Tirzah it is so much more than all that— 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…’ Bawden, who had only just got back to England from seven months of internment in a Vichy prison camp in Morocco, had, together with Douglas Percy Bliss, been Eric’s closest friend from student days.

His use of the adverb ‘almost’ pinpoints, without hyperbole, the precise quality that sets Ravilious—‘the boy’, as he was known— apart and makes his work unique. Others had commented on it, too, during his student days at the Royal College of Art, where Bliss described him as ‘fastidious and assimilative, culling his fruits from any bough… [sifting] with the skill of an anthologist the rare things that could help him in his work… [going] his own way, rather like a sleep-walker, but with a sure step and an unswerving instinct for style’.