Eric Ravilious (his family was probably Huguenot in origin) was born in 1903 and trained at the Eastbourne Art School and the Royal College of Art. One of his instructors was Paul Nash and a fellow student was his lifelong friend Edward Bawden. He was at the centre of the group of artists who, in those two fragile decades between the wars, the Twenties and Thirties, celebrated their Englishness by a passionate devotion to the English countryside, which they painted, with grace and infinite sensitivity, in the medium in which English painters have always excelled: watercolour.

Since his death by drowning off the coast of Iceland in 1942, while an official war artist, Ravilious’s reputation and the value of his works have risen, first slowly, then rapidly, and this rise is likely to continue, placing him in the forefront of English landscape artists alongside