In the summer of 1934 Eric Ravilious made five drawings - he preferred this term to 'watercolour' - depicting the Asham Cement Works and neighbouring chalk quarry on the flank of Beddingham Hill, just off the Newhaven-Lewes road. Most people viewed the recently-established enterprise as an eyesore but to Ravilious, who stumbled upon the site while staying nearby with fellow artist Peggy Angus at her cottage Furlongs, it was a marvel. All around the works the everyday downland scene was transformed by a covering of pale chalk dust. The tracks of a narrow-gauge railway ran this way and that, and were constantly being re-laid or extended as the quarrymen dug deeper into the hillside. But it was the hidden landscape of the chalk pit (or 'cement pit') that most inspired Ravilious. He had long been captivated by the cool Alpine watercolours of itinerant 18th century artist Francis Towne, yet he was wary of the sublime. Modern-leaning artists of his generation avoided mountains and storms, instead focusing on the ordinary countryside and swapping ruined castles for factory buildings and gasometers. While Asham's narrow-gauge railway is a perfect example of this new picturesque, the ever-changing topography of the chalk pit offered Ravilious the opportunity to explore a miniature, man-made, 20th century version of Alpine landscape. The chalk pit became for him a playground of the imagination, a secret place to which only he and Angus had access.

At the time Ravilious was still finding his way as an artist. Asham offered him the opportunity to experiment and in 'The Cement Pit' we can clearly see for the first time aspects of his mature vision. When you think of his best-known downland works, 'The Westbury Horse', for example, or 'The Wilmington Giant' (both 1938), one of the main qualities that stands out is his ability to pull the viewer into a convincing three-dimensional space. The world of a Ravilious watercolour is recognisably the reality we inhabit, but transformed into a luminous dream.

Each of these dreamscapes is carefully constructed so that our eye moves constantly from the foreground into the distance and back again, and it was at Asham and among the surrounding hills that Ravilious began to understand how to do this. With The Cement Pit he used the compositional techniques he learned from Towne, John Sell Cotman and others, contrasting light and dark planes to give a sense of the landscape's structure, but also adopted methods that he would make his own. The railway track bending away from us leads our eye down the valley and so do the telegraph wires on their poles. The taut lines of these modern industrial artefacts lend tension and purpose to the soft bare chalk. So The Cement Pit has one foot in the past of Towne and Cotman, and the other in the industrialised 20th century; an old tradition is not discarded but reinvigorated. At once playful and austere, The Cement Pit is a modern marvel.

This work has been requested by the Holburne Museum, Bath for their forthcoming exhibition Ancient Landscape, Modern Times: Eric Ravilious and the Artists of the Chalk Downs, 2 October 2026 - 10 January 2027.

James Russell, art historian, author and curator, June 2026