Manchester Met University Archives

A first visit to the Manchester Met University Library, i will be going again due to such an expansive collection i saw there, books both original and copies, prints, posters, large size books that are difficult or expensive to get hold of and a brilliant source of first hand information. I am also hoping to visit again to see some of the ceramics and Bawdens' patterned papers and hear some information about them from a worker there.

For now i have added some photographs that i managed to get in a small time scale, further time is needed in order to sort through and select the right information and most relevant, however it was a great trip and fully worthwhile. The workers there were particularly helpful and eager to show me as much as they could.







Apart from a few short interludes most of Bawdens' paintings over a period of nearly 10 years were done in Essex, within the radius of Great Bardfield. Subjects being his own, houses, gardens, the village streets seen from windows or fields. Bawden was always finding inexhaustible fresh subjects, and always had a strong liking for peculiar plants and gardening when not painting.

Ravilious and Bawden concentrate on the typical aspects of country life. Both favouring muted colours such as sepias, browns, blues, greys and ochres. Norbert Lynton; "What joins them is the sense of craft as well as their strong roots in the English scene. But where Bawden is muscular and summary, Ravilious is delicate and precise, bulldog versus greyhound."

The Christmas Bookshop, and advertising insert for the December 1924 edition of the 'studio' was one of the earliest published designs drawn and signed by both Ravilious and Bawden whilst students at the Royal College of Art.





Bawden took a step from watercolour to engraving his compositions onto copper. He exploited the coloured lino-block to its best advantage for his designs. His wallpapers were subtle, fresh and beautiful, vignettes and borders poured from his originative imagination.









Similarly to how i take an interest in working Eric Ravilious often does so in a smaller scale to Bawden and its medium was either delicate and exact or supportive of a text or a manufactured object. In all of these fields his approach was broadly traditional, and his work addressed neither political or social issues. A connection to Ravilious whom he admired was the watercolorists David Jones, and at that similar time in the 1920s his work became more detailed and elaborated than it became in his great last ten years.