Tennis for Anyone? Class and Social Transformation on the Court in Eric Ravilious' Tennis (1930)

Eric Ravilious’ 1930 painting Tennis, one of the most important works of art to examine the modern game, has been broadly overlooked by historians of both sport and art. A close analysis of this work, however, can reveal a great deal about the complex, contradictory and unstable identity of tennis during the interwar years in Britain, as well as how conventions and modes for the visual representation of tennis were themselves constantly in flux. As a case study, this work demonstrates the shifts in the socio-cultural identity of both tennis and tennis art as each negotiated a transition from the upper-middle class tennis parties of the Victorian and Edwardian era to the hyper-competitiveness, internationalism, and burgeoning professionalism of the game as it evolved in the aftermath of the First World War. Issues such as class identity, the expansion and popularisation of the game for a wider social constituency and gender politics illustrate how Ravilious’ work explicitly deployed traditional conventions for the representation of tennis yet, at the same time, subtly subverted and transformed these to highlight these very shifts the game was experiencing, thus bringing the representation of tennis up to date.