Eric William Ravilious

The only complete series to appear at auction, the present set sold at Christie’s South Kensington, 4 April 2007 (lot 77, £102,000)

Born in London and raised in East Sussex, Eric Ravilious returned to the capital in 1922 to attend the Royal College of Art, where he became a student of Britain’s beloved war artist Paul Nash. Following in Nash’s footsteps, at the outbreak of the Second World War Ravilious was one of the first artists selected by the War Artist Advisory Committee to document the country’s military forces and their endeavours. From 1940-42, until his untimely death during an RAF rescue mission, Ravilious created extraordinary works on paper and lithographs capturing powerful British vessels and aircrafts.

Appointed as an Honorary Captain in the Royal Marines, Ravilious began his career as a war artist in the barracks at Chatham Dockyard on the River Medway in Kent. There, he sketched and painted coastal defences, warships and airborne barrages before leaving land to sail with the crew aboard the HMS Highlander, a destroyer used for convoy escort. Their mission took Ravilious to Norway and back, after which he settled at HMS Dolphin, site of the Royal Navy’s submarine service. It was at this shore base at Gosport that the artist was then granted access to L-class submarines, which while not typically employed during the Second World War, remained in use for education and training exercises.

Aboard these vessels, Ravilious studied their interiors with great interest. “There is something jolly good about it,” Ravilious said of being inside a submarine, “a blue gloom with coloured lights and everyone in shirts and braces.” Using the myriad drawings and photographs he created in situ, the illustrator re-interpreted the crafts and their crews in a 1941 suite of ten lithographs known as the Submarine Series. One of his final major artworks, Ravilious’ Submarine Series is noted as “perhaps his most coherent group of wartime works” according to the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. With their otherworldly colour palette and sinuous lines, these artful lithographs appear to be works of magical realism. Very much based in fact, however, they shed light on everyday life aboard British submarines. The figure in Officer Looking Through a Periscope, for instance, has been identified as Lieutenant RE Campbell, D.S.C., R.N.  

Complete examples of the Submarine Series are exceptionally rare. The present set, in good condition with fresh colours, best displays the artist’s observation skills and printmaking prowess.