At first glance, Eric Ravilious’s 1930 triptych Tennis reveals a typical afternoon of leisure enjoyed by a group of privileged young men and women, some rather amateurishly playing a game of doubles, a couple canoodling on the bank, two leaving the scene to do something else.
The work was commissioned by Sir Geoffrey Fry, the Private Secretary to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, to hang in his Portman Square Music Room. He later donated it to Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, where it can nowadays be seen.
But look a little closer, and you can see that there’s something unsettling going on. For a start, there’s a lot of uncanny ‘doubling’, beyond just that of the tennis players (the pink-dressed departing girls, the stylised willows, the gazebo structures, the shadows). It is very possible that Ravilious had been influenced by Freud’s influential 1919 work, The Uncanny. It could certainly be argued that there is a Surrealist element to the work.
Why, for example, is the tree on the left, which casts a sinister Paul Nash-ian shadow across the first panel, so unseasonably leafless? Why do the shadows of two of the players not continue into the next panel? And what on earth is that strange mound behind the sprinting girl, mounted by a mysterious wooden gazebo?
Sadly, Ravilious died in a wartime plane crash in Iceland twelve years after painting Tennis, without ever answering the first two questions. The last one, however, we can resolve. We know, from information provided by Bristol M&AG, that Ravilious based the tennis court on one in Manor Gardens, in his hometown of Eastbourne.
This rung a bell, and a sift through Ravilious’s oeuvre uncovered an earlier woodcut of three tennis players walking past a similar mound – topped by a stone table rather than a gazebo – entitled Manor Gardens, Eastbourne. It turns out that the park was bought by Eastbourne Borough Council in 1921, and within it was a 20-foot mound, with steps leading to its summit, where a previous owner had buried his horse. A remarkable structure then – a Victorian play on neolithic ritual landscape? – and another mystery that deserves unravelling.
The mound can still be seen in Manor Gardens, still topped by the table-like sculpture. Ravilious has replaced it in the painting with a more elegant gazebo, to mirror the one in the right-hand panel. We strongly suspect that this structure is loosely based on another landmark in Manor Gardens, an octagonal Grade II listed 18th-century gazebo named The Hermitage.
For the record, there is no evidence of Eric Ravilious, from a lower-middle class background, ever practicing tennis himself, though we do know that he played in the Royal College of Art’s famously hopeless football team, alongside Henry Moore.