At the end of his rather short life, Eric Ravilious was a war artist and a victim of WWII, being lost over Iceland in an airplane. But before then — apart from endless sermons in church which his theologian father made the family sit through — Ravilious led a charmed life. He loved the countryside, which he depicted in exquisite wood engravings, where rendering the texture of objects and landscapes was just as rewarding as it was challenging. This love of texture was transferred to painting when he took up drawing and tinted them with watercolours (he called his paintings ‘drawings’). His colours are often muted, but I’m not sure the evidence is there that he didn’t like green, as one author claims: Ravilious may have preferred to show the Sussex Downs, for instance, in moodier lights than broad daylight, but he seems not to shun green, only to want a soft rather than a strident look. He had great skill but also a loving innocence of vision that would inspire any modern illustrator. The simplicity of line and canny modelling belie the technical difficulty of the work he often did, as for the lithographic illustrations for High Street, reproduced in a facsimile edition by the Victoria & Albert Museum (the original plates were destroyed during the war). That book also has the virtue of reminding us how much things have changed since his lifetime (a hot water bottle, for instance, was made of ceramic and bought at the hardware store, and the newfangled rubber job that we are so used to was only beginning to supplant it). Ravilious had a winning and recognizable style, but he was also a searching and innovative artist whose aesthetic path might have taken other turns, had he lived. After a period of neglect it seems that he was rediscovered — and his stock, as they say, should only go up from here.