Oyster Bar by Eric Ravilious

Lithograph for ‘High Street’, 1938 – one of 24 exquisite images of pre-war shops.

John Piper (previewing the work in ‘Signature’, 1937) writes: ‘Ravilious is a particularly English artist…..there is probably no-one else who could have made these records at once so faithfully and imaginatively. There is about them the suggestion that you are looking in at a series of gay, old-fashioned parties from the matter-of-fact street in the present. They are records of a passing beauty, but they are full of present-day experience. And they are faithful enough to look like tuck-shops full of sherbert, liquorice and lollipops – which, after all, is one of the chief appeals of the attractive shop’.