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Episode details

Radio 3,08 Feb 2015,45 mins

Eric Ravilious: Chalk and Ice

Sunday Feature

Available for over a year

Eric Ravilious is considered one of the best watercolourists of the twentieth century. His art is increasingly familiar: a chalk horse seen through a train window, an engine abandoned in a field, the oddly sinister curve of a hosepipe on a greenhouse floor. 'Eric Ravilious: Chalk and Ice' explores the Essex landscapes that Ravilious loved. The Fry Gallery in Saffron Walden is a treasure-house of his work from ceramics and book illustrations to the sublime watercolours he painted before serving as an Official War Artist in the Arctic Circle where he died in 1942 at the age of only 39. Alexandra Harris explores the life of work of this elusive man and his art with the writers Hermione Lee and Robert Macfarlane, art historians Frances Spalding and Alan Powers, poets Pauline Stainer and Sean O'Brien and the Director of the Fry Gallery David Oelman..

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