Chalk Paths Print by Eric Ravilious
 
Painted in 1935 'Chalk Paths' features the archetypal view of the South Downs in East Sussex on the South coast of England. Ravilious shows rolling green hills and the chalk landscape worn away by millennia of feet traversing the land. The white chalk paths are well trodden, the fences zigzag their way across the terrain. His love of his native South Downs inspired many of Eric's most famous paintings and 'Chalk Paths' is possibly his most iconic and best-loved. Like many of his landscape paintings 'Chalk Paths' exhibits a poignant beauty evoked by the artist's obvious love of his surroundings. He referred to them in a letter to his wife as 'long white roads of temptation'. He went on to say 'What quests they propose! They take us away into the thin air of the future or to the underworld of the past'.