THIS WILL BE FOLLOWED BY THE NEW MEMBERS LUNCH

Watercolourist, muralist, ceramicist and wood-engraver, Eric Ravilious was one of the most distinctive young British artists working between the two World Wars; he is also an artist who is of increasing interest and popularity, as recent exhibitions and sales of his work have revealed. This lecture explores Ravilious’s career, looking both at his place in the long tradition of watercolour painting in England, as well as within the social and cultural context of England in the 1920s and ‘30s, leading up to his untimely death as an official war artist in Iceland in 1942.

Dr David Boyd Haycock is a freelance art historian and curator. He is best known for his 2009 book, A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War, and the subsequent exhibition he curated at Dulwich Picture Gallery (2013). Educated at the University of Oxford, he is a specialist in British art and culture in the period 1848 to 1945. His latest books include Brilliant Destiny: The Age of Augustus John (2023) and Art-Quake, 1910: The 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists' Exhibition (2026). An Arts Society lecturer since 2010, he is based in Oxford.