Game of the Week: The quiet, restorative puzzles of Botany Manor
And a bit about Cucumber House.
One of my favourite paintings is Cucumber House, a watercolour - I think - by Eric Ravilious. It's an airy study in quiet. To me, it always feels like a day off school. We're inside some kind of greenhouse and various plants are growing. Glass slants overhead and there's a sense of careful order, of something lovingly tended, to the layout, the tables, the leaves and shoots. Cucumber House was painted in 1935, and I don't see the thirties as an enormously quiet decade. Ravilious himself would be killed in the war that was already starting to rumble. And yet: breathe in, breathe out. I really do love this painting.
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