Alan Bennett chooses four paintings for schools

Letters

Vol. 20 No. 9 · 7 May 1998

From Ian Carter

How nice that when Messrs Sainsbury asked Alan Bennett to choose four images for display in local schools (LRB, 2 April) he should wish to include Eric Ravilious’s Train Landscape. Bennett ascribes his love for British painting of the Forties and Fifties to Shell’s patronage of contemporary work. Didn’t Joe Lyons open even one teashop in Leeds? Contemplating the block-mounted modern British paintings which Lyons, too, had commissioned helped me pass many teenage Saturdays when I should have been clearing tables in Joe’s Luton teashop. Even now, when I close my eyes, I can conjure up a Piper and a Nicholson.

Ravilious gets much too fashionable today, at least for those of us who collect fugitive Wedgwood ceramics made in the Thirties, Forties and Fifties and adorned with his whimsical designs. These are charming, but Train Landscape is an important painting, one of a series treating Neolithic white horses. Here the Westbury horse stands framed by a Great Western Railway carriage window. This effect refracts Augustus Egg’s Travelling Companions (1862), in the Birmingham gallery. Egg shows us two richly clad young women in the mould of Ingres, luxuriously (and, surely, erotically) ignoring the view of the Bay of Naples through the window of their first-class railway carriage. Ravilious’s compartment is empty. Patterns on moquette seats, graining on mahogany door and window frames, evoke the woodcut skills in which Ravilious challenged Thomas Bewick. Numbers on the compartment door play to his typographical interests (as in his ‘Alphabet’ design for Wedgwood). The big ‘3’ on the door tells us that this is a third-class carriage, far removed from Egg’s sybaritism. Above his number lies the framed landscape, with downland nature yielding imperceptibly to cultivated ploughland.

This picture is an intervention in a long debate. The rude intrusion of the railways into 19th-century landscapes evoked very different responses from painters. In Rain, Steam and Speed (1844), Turner counterposed threat with promise in a perennially unsettling image. Later painters used Claudian conventions to neuter this threat by settling the train in the landscape. Ravilious inverts this procedure, settling the landscape in the train. It’s astonishing how well the inversion works. But we also should recognise other conventions with which he plays. Like Turner and W. Heath Robinson, he shows us a Great Western train. This company was notoriously disdainful of less monied passengers: yet Ravilious depicts a third-class compartment. Celebrating a democratic version of English cultural continuity (that downland/ploughland vista), Train Landscape summarises much of what he and Edward Bawden sought to achieve in their artists’ commune at Great Bardfield in Essex.

This genteel landscape poses a problem for Alan Bennett, for whom it is ‘redolent of all the journeys by train I remember, particularly in my teens and during my National Service, when it was still possible to explore the English countryside by rail’. But Ravilious shows us a very particular landscape, loaded with very particular cultural freight. This is Edward Thomas’s South Country: that ultra-southern strip of land from Kent to Wiltshire which Victorian and Edwardian writers and artists, recoiling from Northern industrial blight, constructed as an unchanging dream world embodying real, unchanging England. Alan Bennett should recognise that Ravilious’s skill seduces as it beguiles. What know they of England who only Wiltshire know?

Ian Carter
Auckland, New Zealand

Vol. 20 No. 11 · 4 June 1998

From Harvey Plant

The only pictures on the walls of my son’s infant school are by himself and his classmates. Not to be scoffed at, but there’d be scope, you’d have thought, for the odd reproduction, as there was in Alan Bennett’s day (LRB, 2 April), though I’m not sure, multiculturally speaking, that an Adoration would go down well in our LEA. My son is not yet a devotee of the LRB but Bennett’s piece, open on the kitchen table, caught his interest. He liked the Stubbs more than anything and explained that Hambletonian was running away from the remains of a smouldering rainforest in South America. There’d been conflagration and a fantastic application of saws and axes. Hambletonian had made his getaway as the last tree crashed to the ground. Until then, I’d thought that kids in schools would mostly want to know why there’s a house where Hambletonian’s willy might be, but I see now that this is a frivolous adult anxiety.

Harvey Plant
Leeds

From David Andrew

Alan Bennett recalls childhood trips to the swimming baths – please tell him I went to the baths on the bus to Middleton Junction, that’s Middleton north of Manchester – and wonders why no one carries their cossies about in a Swiss roll nowadays. The first answer that came to mind was just that we went by bus in those days not by car. But a better answer is that, since then, plastic has come into common use. So the answer is the cheap carrier bag. You couldn’t put a wet cossy into anything made of paper.

David Andrew
DAndrew859@aol.com

Vol. 20 No. 13 · 2 July 1998

From David Hooper

Over thirteen years ago I moved from Yorkshire to Essex, and now Harvey Plant (Letters, 4 June) has given me good reason for doing so. On wandering into the primary school opposite my home I noticed on the walls good-quality, framed, poster-sized prints from Diego Rivera, Richard Diebenkorn, Picasso, Georgia O’Keefe and Norman Rockwell, among others. What a refreshing change, not a Sunflower or Starry Night in sight. This same school recently suffered an Ofsted inspection, in the course of which, one nine-year-old pupil said to an inspector: ‘This is a great school. I didn’t know metaphors existed till I came here.’ Regrettably, my own children are now older than me and unable to benefit from a school education in Thurrock.

David Hooper
Chafford Hundred, Essex