STANSTED MOUNTFITCHET.- Recent major retrospectives for Eric Ravilious and Kenneth Rowntree at Dulwich Picture Gallery and Pallant House Gallery in Chichester have cast the spotlight on the Great Bardfield artists, who also include Edward Bawden, John Aldridge and others.

Guy Schooling, managing director of Sworders auctioneers in Stansted Mountfitchet and a long-term friend of the Ravilious and Bawden families, runs his auction house less than 15 miles from the village that became home to a decades-lasting artistic community in the 1930s that he argues rivals St Ives for talent, inspiration and importance.

The artists’ open-house exhibitions of the 1950s attracted national and international media attention as the idea of viewing modern art in a remote country setting caught visitors’ imagination.

As a keen supporter of the Fry Art Gallery in nearby Saffron Walden, where the Great Bardfield artists now find their spiritual home, Schooling has a particularly close affinity with this community of art and judges 2016 to be the year when they will finally break through to a new level of recognition as ‘the next big thing’.

This belief is a major factor in Sworders’ decision to launch a dedicated Modern British Art sale, the first of which will take place on April 12, with the Great Bardfield consignments headlined by one of the most important Ravilious watercolours to come onto the market in recent years.

‘The James’ and ‘The Foremost Prince’, signed and dated August 1934, three years after Ravilious (1903-42) and Edward Bawden (1903-89) first moved to Great Bardfield, creating the core of what was to become a unique community of artists.

The painting measures 50 x 58cm and comes with a provenance once placing it with the Zwemmer Gallery. It also appeared in the 2003-4 Imperial War Museum exhibition in London, 'Eric Ravilious: Imagined Realities, A Centenary Exhibition’, celebrating his work as a war artist – he died in a plane crash off Iceland aged just 39 in 1942.

Estimated at £40,000-60,000, it is accompanied by a number of works by other Great Bardfield artists. Schooling is particularly excited by the work of John Aldridge (1905-83), who also lived part of his in the artists and writers enclave life in Deya, Mayorca headed by Robert Graves.

Sworders’ sale features an oil-on-board view of Deya, signed ad dated ’72 and estimated at £500-800. Meanwhile a limited edition Bawden linocut inspired by William Blake’s poem The Tyger, number 37/50, carries hopes of £800-1200.

“Prices for some of the biggest names in Modern British art have gone stratospheric in recent years, so collectors are turning their attention to the next phase, and all the signs are that the Great Bardfield community’s time has come,” says Guy. “Ravilious and Bawden are already well established, but interest is rising fast in the likes of John Aldridge, Kenneth Rowntree and Walter Hoyle.

“This is very much our local art movement and we have very strong ties with it, as we do with other notable East Anglian names like Cedric Morris, so it is an exciting time for us.

“The artists, while cooperating with exhibitions and open studios, were determinedly not ‘a school’ and had no manifesto. It would perhaps be most accurate to refer to them as North West Essex artists. The tradition survives to this day, lead by Richard Bawden and Chloe Cheese, amongst others.”

Beyond the Great Bardfield artists, Sworders’ sale will also feature Elizabeth Wright studio works, a Lowry sketch and pieces by Mary Newcomb (1922-2008) pieces.