BAWDEN, RAVILIOUS AND THE ART OF GREAT BARDFIELD

LIGHTBOX, WOKING

Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious met on their first day at the Royal College of Art in 1922, and immediately became firm friends. Their teacher, Paul Nash, described the pair as ‘an extraordinary outbreak of talent’.

Edward Bawden, Borough Market, 1967, lithograph, © The Estate of Edward Bawden

They spent a lot of time together, even after they both got married. For two years, from 1932, Ravilious and his artist wife Tirzah Garwood lodged in the house Bawden and his wife Charlotte Epton shared in Great Bardfield, Essex, before moving to nearby Castle Hedingham.

From this period Great Bardfield became the centre of a community of largely figurative artists, which kept going long after Ravilious’ untimely death on service as a war artist in Iceland, in 1942. The group included the likes of John Aldridge, George Chapman, Stanley Clifford-Smith, Audrey Cruddas, Walter Hoyle, Sheila Robinson, Michael Rothenstein, Kenneth Rountree and Marianne Straub. In the summers of 1954, 1955 and 1958, many of these artists displayed their work in their own houses – a seminal endeavour – leading to thousands of visitors making a cultural pilgrimage to the Essex village.

In 1985 The Fry Art Gallery was established in Saffron Walden to showcase the artistic output of the Great Bardfield community, and many of the pieces in this show – which charts the progress of the group until its disintegration in the late 60s – are drawn from their extensive collection, supplemented by pieces from the Ingram Collection, housed at the Lightbox.

Lightbox, Woking, until October 9