This familiar Eric Ravilious image, entitled Train Landscape, is not all it seems. In fact, it is not entirely Eric’s own work. And it has much more relevance to his home county of East Sussex than you’d imagine.

I discovered this while chatting to filmmaker Margy Kinmonth, in front of the painting, at the Ravilious exhibition Extraordinary Everyday, in Winchester, earlier this year. Margy has spent the last five years making the documentary Drawn to War, about Ravilious’s life and work, and has become an expert on the Eastbourne-and-bred artist.

The chalk horse you can see is a representation of the Westbury White Horse, on the escarpment of Salisbury Plain, in Wiltshire, also depicted in two other Ravilious watercolours. But Eric, Margy tells me, originally painted an image of the Long Man of Wilmington in the place of the horse, a symbol that was recurrent in his artwork, appearing in several of his watercolours (held by the V&A), his Zodiac series wood engravings, and the mural he produced at Morley College.

The Long Man of Wilmington is visible on the train line between Lewes and Polegate, and this was a journey that Eric frequently made, as a child and as an adult, travelling third class (he was short of money all his life). “He used to get a day ticket and go up and down in the train all day long between Eastbourne and Lewes drawing and painting from his carriage,” says Margy.

He painted a first version of the watercolour in 1939, but he was dissatisfied with how it turned out, so created a second version, replacing the Long Man with a White Horse, and darkening the colour of the livery. He still wasn’t happy, though, and abandoned the project.

“Tirzah, who often collaborated with her husband, writes in her autobiography, Long Live Great Barfield, that she cut up the two paintings, and joined together the better bits, to make a satisfactory whole,” Margy tells me. And so this is more of a collage than a painting, and might accurately be captioned ‘Train Landscape, by Eric Ravilious and Tirzah Garwood’.

This familiar Eric Ravilious image, entitled Train Landscape, is not all it seems. In fact, it is not entirely Eric’s own work. And it has much more relevance to his home county of East Sussex than you’d imagine.

I discovered this while chatting to filmmaker Margy Kinmonth, in front of the painting, at the Ravilious exhibition Extraordinary Everyday, in Winchester, earlier this year. Margy has spent the last five years making the documentary Drawn to War, about Ravilious’s life and work, and has become an expert on the Eastbourne-and-bred artist.

The chalk horse you can see is a representation of the Westbury White Horse, on the escarpment of Salisbury Plain, in Wiltshire, also depicted in two other Ravilious watercolours. But Eric, Margy tells me, originally painted an image of the Long Man of Wilmington in the place of the horse, a symbol that was recurrent in his artwork, appearing in several of his watercolours (held by the V&A), his Zodiac series wood engravings, and the mural he produced at Morley College.

The Long Man of Wilmington is visible on the train line between Lewes and Polegate, and this was a journey that Eric frequently made, as a child and as an adult, travelling third class (he was short of money all his life). “He used to

Tirzah’s memory of the process, it seems, was verified when the overlays were temporarily removed before a Ravilious exhibition in Wiltshire in 2021, to reveal the Long Man of Wilmington, and cream-coloured livery, underneath.

The story means a lot to Margy, because it was the Long Man of Wilmington which drew her to the film project in the first place. “I spent a lot of my childhood with my grandparents who lived in Wilmington,” she says. “We’d go out of the back of the house and there was the Long Man on the hill at the top of the village, just beyond the church with its ancient yew tree. As children, we used to climb all over it, tracing our journey in his steep outline, which used to be made of bricks.”

“And we used to watch from the train window to get a glimpse of the Long Man of Wilmington up on the Downs, as we sped past on our way to Polegate Station. The same was true for Eric Ravilious, he loved looking out of the train window. He used to stick his head out, and, apparently, once his hat flew off.”

Words by Alex Leith

Drawn to War was released in July 2022 in select cinemas, including Lewes Depot where Alex conducted a post-film Q&A with director Margy Kinmonth. @raviliousfilm | lewesdepot.org