When the latest edition of the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack appears this month (in hard copy with the paperback to follow in June), a photograph of Harry Brook will grace the cover.
It would have been an easy choice for the editors, who needed to decide on the cover in time for a long print run with tight deadlines. Last October Brook scored 317 against Pakistan in Multan, the first triple-century by an England batsman in 34 years. It also helped England win a Test match that Pakistan should never have lost, having scored 556 runs in the first innings.
So much for Brook, though; just above his picture, Wisden retains — as it has done ever since cover photos were introduced in 2003 (England captain Michael Vaughan in that case) — the emblematic image first used in 1938 to mark the almanack’s 75th anniversary. The wood engraving features a tableau from the Victorian era of a wicketkeeper and batsman, both in top hats, by an artist who has received recent acknowledgment 80 years after his death, and obscurity almost as long.
Much of that revival has been due to a film, Eric Ravilious — Drawn to War, released in 2022 and since then shown in about 500 UK theatres and on Sky TV. “His amazing art transfers powerfully onto the big screen,” filmmaker Margy Kinmonth wrote in the 2023 Wisden.
She tells the FM: “I spent a very long time writing that piece. There was a lot of original research in it and the connection to Ravilious’s interest in cricket and how much he played, what he scored and how much he liked it. The question for me writing that piece was to tie it in, obviously, to Wisden and that famous image that’s been right on the front page.”
When Ravilious was commissioned by Wisden to design the image, he was already an established artist, regarded more for his landscapes but also proficient in the art of wood engraving. Kinmonth’s film, a bit like CLR James’s famous aphorism, “What do they know about cricket who only cricket know”, is not just about those two men in top hats and whites. There’s a lot more.
He grew up in Eastbourne, Sussex, where his parents ran an antiques shop and he attended a local high school, winning a bursary to the local art school and in 1922 another to the Royal College of Art, where he befriended Edward Bawden, of a similar age and not yet the famed English painter.
He also studied under Paul Nash, who is renowned for his contributions to modern British art, and who would have encouraged Ravilious’s wood-engraving skills.
All the while, Ravilious watched a lot of cricket, and played too, albeit at a lower level. He recalls hitting sixes in a 1935 match for the Double Crown Club, a dining club for printers and book designers, against a village team at Castle Hedingham in Essex.
The commission by Wisden two years later would establish Ravilious’s reputation, along with the landscapes that he was becoming known for, especially the bleak ones of cold climates.
“He was captivated by the dense Arctic landscapes and glaciers, having been inspired by Francis Towne’s 1781 painting of Mont Blanc,” says his granddaughter Ella Ravilious, a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, where his work is now kept.
It was an obsession that would lead to Ravilious’s early death.
When World War 2 broke out in 1939, Ravilious, then starting a young family, joined up with his old mentor Nash, both becoming war artists. He specialised in naval operations and had hoped to reach Russia in 1942 where bitter naval campaigns were being fought against Nazi Germany by Allied Arctic convoys — just the setting that appealed to Ravilious.
He took an assignment to Iceland and while there was offered a ride in an aircraft flying a search pattern for a missing plane. In one of war’s tragic ironies, Ravilious’s plane disappeared too — the first war artist to die in World War 2.
Kinmonth’s tribute to an artist who was almost forgotten includes an artist who has known fame in his own lifetime.
Grayson Perry, who is unafraid to tackle complex social issues through his art, including through his cross-dressing alter ego, Claire, says Ravilious “takes unprepossessing subjects and turns them into masterpieces”.
One of those adorns the cover of Wisden every year.
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