Pre-framed small print of Eric Ravilious Buscot Park print using a solid oak moulding and acid-free off white bevelled cut mount. Ready to hang

Image Size 170mm x 120mm . framed size 300mm x 250mm.

Buscot Park Watercolour on paper, 1938.

Gavin Henderson, Second Baron Faringdon, was a Labour politician, a prominent member of the Fabian Society, and an associate of the Artists’ International Association, a group of artists committed to supporting the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War. When the Association appealed to Ravilious to donate his fee should he receive a commission, he agreed. Henderson, who had recently inherited both his title and Buscot Park, subsequently commissioned this painting.

Ravilious and his wife, Tirzah, spent a weekend at Buscot Park in June 1938. Of the house and its surroundings, Ravilious wrote: ‘Faringdon was such a palatial country house, the grandest I was ever in, and the park and the lakes were lovely too – there were white peacocks and black swans and a whale’s jaw bones in the garden’.

The painting captures the beauty of Buscot Park, but its appeal lies in more than its picturesque subject. Ravilious frequently introduced elements of tension and complexity into his landscapes. Tirzah later observed that he was fortunate that the grass was being mown, allowing him to paint the contrasting stripes across the foreground, while a storm was gathering behind the house.

That approaching storm is echoed by the rusty fence, barbed wire and discarded machinery—motifs that Ravilious repeatedly incorporated into his work. These details introduce a note of unease into an otherwise idyllic scene. Painted in 1938, they can also seem, with hindsight, to carry a faint sense of the uncertainty and upheaval that was soon to engulf Europe.

Buscot Park is therefore both an exceptionally beautiful painting and something more complex: a celebration of an extraordinary country house, tempered by Ravilious’s characteristic awareness of the landscape and the world beyond it.