He was so much an ambassador for Britain that he was chosen to design the catalogue covers for the British pavilion at the Paris Exhibition of 1937 and at the New York World's Fair of 1939. For many years he was the artist of choice for the Wisden cricket annual.

To mark the coronations of Edward VIII and, after the abdication crisis, of George VI, Wedgwood asked him to design commemorative mugs. Wallis Simpson was the first customer to buy one of the blue, white and yellow Edward mugs from the London stockists.

After a stint living in gravy-coloured bedsits in Kensington as an art student and later in Hammersmith when newly married, Ravilious rented a series of farmhouses on the Sussex Downs and in Essex and Capel-y-ffin in Wales. These landscapes, particularly the Downs, inspired many of his watercolours. The ancient figures of the Wilmington Giant and the White Horse chalked into the Downs appear in several sketches and in Train Landscape (1939) he painted the Westbury Horse from inside an old-fashioned train carriage as it rattled through the hills.


"Train Landscape" (1939)

He delighted in roads lined with tautly strung telephone lines beneath lowering skies, and in outhouses, barns, lean-to sheds and the backs of cottage gardens. In one watercolour painted at Furlongs Farm, the setting for the tea-table scene, three sunflowers in the foreground are on the verge of toppling over in the sleepy heat of late August.

He found beauty in order as well as the ramshackle. Having met a nurseryman with immaculately maintained greenhouses, Ravilious painted a series of watercolours of neat rows of cyclamen planted in terracotta pots, ripening tomatoes and skinny-stemmed geraniums bursting into bloom.

One of the most reproduced of these Sussex paintings of the late 1930s is Wet Afternoon. Thin streaks of rain fleck the countryside as a man in a waxed jacket and hat walks down a narrow country lane in the direction, we hope, of a cup of tea.