The final insult came when Wisden demoted Ravilious's woodcut of two top-hatted gents at the wicket from its main front cover image after 76 years. The editor Tim de Lisle was damning: "It has an undeniable magic, a charm and character all its own, but it is fusty, repetitive and predictable, it arouses no curiosity and has no news value . . . It is half-icon, half-millstone, and with every year that goes by, the balance tips a little further towards the negative." Ravilious's woodcut was replaced with a colour photograph of England captain Michael Vaughan. The Times called it an act of "treachery".

In the last ten years, however, an admirable group of champions have sought to resurrect Ravilious. It began with an exhibition of his work at the Imperial War Museum in 2003 to celebrate the centenary of his birth. The exhibition was curated by Alan Powers, who has since written three books on the artist. The superlative Eric Ravilious: Artist and Designer (Lund Humpries, £35) was published last year. Powers suspects that the renewal in interest in Ravilious is "a lot about nostalgia".

He adds: "Not the nostalgia evoked by warm beer, it is better compared to sweet but astringent lemonade — served perhaps from the Lemonade Set he designed for Wedgwood, after tennis on a Thirties afternoon."

The other great standard-bearer for Ravilious has been Tim Mainstone, whose small independent publishing house The Mainstone Press has published seven books on the artist, with accompanying essays by the historian James Russell, including a facsimile of Country Life's "High Street", amounting almost to a complete survey of his works.

Prices for his work defy expectations. One of Ravilious's George VI coronation mugs was sold by Duke's Auctioneers in Dorchester this year for the astonishing price of £1,220, more than double the £500 estimate and a remarkable sum for a mass-produced souvenir. Last December I received two birthday cards and three Christmas cards all with Ravilious woodcut illustrations. The Tate has seen a surge in sales of cards by Ravilious and Edward Bawden, his friend and RCA contemporary, in the last two years.

A.N. Wilson believes that his appeal lies in an "extraordinary combination of old-fashion English elegist with a completely modern artist, painting airplanes and warships as well as white horses on the side of hills".

In the artist's final days, flying planes off the coast of Norway, he continued to find inspiration from the landscape and the biting, wet conditions. From an RAF outpost in Iceland he wrote a letter to his wife. It arrived a week after his plane went missing. "It is jolly cold here, and windy and rainy too, like January, after the hot sun in Scotland: no place for you at all, though you would like the country, especially the flowers and the seals . . . We flew over that mountain country that looks like craters on the moon and it looked just like those photographs the M. of Information gave me, with shadows very dark and shaped like leaves."

He sent his love to their three children and reassured her that he was eating well. It had rained earlier, and there was, he complained, no tea to be had anywhere — an Englishman to the very end.


"Observation Post" (1939)