{"id":1240,"date":"2015-07-13T16:39:05","date_gmt":"2015-07-13T16:39:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reeddesign.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=1240"},"modified":"2018-03-26T16:02:05","modified_gmt":"2018-03-26T16:02:05","slug":"ravilious-and-the-cerne-abbas-giant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reeddesign.co.uk\/wordpress\/2015\/07\/13\/ravilious-and-the-cerne-abbas-giant\/","title":{"rendered":"Ravilious and The Cerne Abbas Giant"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve now been twice to see the Eric Ravilious<\/a> exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery<\/a>. I love his work, particularly the watercolours of the chalk downland and chalk hill figures. But I find his depiction of the Cerne Abbas Giant<\/a> extremely puzzling. The giant is painted brown, rather than gleaming chalk white.<\/p>\n

\"Revilious,<\/a><\/p>\n

It was painted in 1939 and some people have said that the figure was camouflaged to prevent German pilots using it as a landmark. But I thought that the hill figures weren’t covered over until early in 1940. In fact the exhibition catalogue states: “The following year<\/em> [i.e. 1940 – the year after the painting was made] saw a mass turfing-over of chalk figures, to prevent enemy airmen using them as landmarks.” <\/em>Despite searching for ages I can’t find any specific reference online that says exactly when the the Giant was camouflaged.<\/p>\n

I’ve retouched a version of the painting to see what it would have looked like with the figure in white. Much as I like Ravilious’s painting, I think I would have preferred to see it this way.<\/p>\n

\"Revilious,<\/a><\/p>\n

Click on the images to see them larger and to fade from one to the other.<\/p>\n

Also interesting is how much Ravilious has changed the vertical scale of the hillside in order to give a clearer view of the Giant. Compare with this photograph which I took in 2012 from much the same position.<\/p>\n

\"Cerne<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve now been twice to see the Eric Ravilious exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. I love his work, particularly the watercolours of the chalk downland and chalk hill figures. But I find his depiction of the Cerne Abbas Giant extremely puzzling. The giant is painted brown, rather than gleaming chalk white.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,15],"tags":[13,63],"class_list":["post-1240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-photography","tag-art","tag-painting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reeddesign.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reeddesign.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reeddesign.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reeddesign.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reeddesign.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1240"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/reeddesign.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2066,"href":"https:\/\/reeddesign.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240\/revisions\/2066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reeddesign.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reeddesign.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reeddesign.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}