Battleship and Submarine

This early painting, done during the First World War when RE was about 12 years old, was found in a scrapbook he compiled to show a selection of studies ". . . drawn before I went to the Slade School, London in 1924 - so they represent a cross section of what I was studying out of school up to the age of twenty one.".

Richard had to learn to deflect anti-German feeling at his boarding school.
"I found there was one way in which I could make my fellows forget their antagonisms. It was generally acknowledged that I could draw so I entertained the uncritical rabble with extravagant battle pictures, often of a murderous nature, and in their appreciation of these works they lost sight of my German antecedents."