Spitfires on a Camouflaged Runway by Eric Ravilious, watercolour on paper

After his first assignment with the Admiralty, from February 1942 Official War Artist Eric Ravilious worked on Air Ministry subjects.

He made this watercolour at RAF Sawbridgeworth, where he depicted pilot training and aircraft both on runways and in flight. There, and for many other airfields, the RAF’s Camouflage Section implemented schemes of coloured patterns and surfaces to disguise runways and aircraft as agricultural land, concealing them from enemy aircraft. In August, Ravilious travelled to Iceland, hoping to represent operations in a more dramatic landscape, taking inspiration, as several artists of his generation did, from earlier Romantic landscape watercolourists. Days later, he went missing (presumed dead) aboard an air-sea reconnaissance flight that never returned. From the Air Ministry allocation of works from the War Artists' Advisory Committee, 1947. Original accession number: LD2509. On loan from the RAF Air Historical Branch (MOD). Copyright: Crown (expired) / RAF Museum.