Born in Cambridge, Lucy Raverat is the daughter of Mark Pryor and Sophie Gurney (née Raverat), and granddaughter of the artists Gwen Raverat (née Darwin) and Jacques Raverat.[1] Through her maternal grandmother, Lucy Raverat is a great-great-granddaughter of the naturalist Charles Darwin.[1] In 1968 she married Francis Rawlinson and went on to have 4 children and 7 grandchildren.
Raverat was interested in art through her youth, and in the 1960s she attended Hornsey College of Art, where she completed a pre-diploma course.[2][3] From there she travelled, spending time in India where she met her future husband, before moving to Lancaster. There she returned to painting, taking it up full-time after her children started attending school.[2] In the 1990s she moved to France, where she currently resides.[1][3]
Raverat often employs elements from her own life in her work, although they can be presented as "magically touched by fantasy",[3] and she has incorporated representations of herself through the series painted for the Francis Kyle Gallery's Roma exhibition, "present in each composition as a tiny, wraith-like figure in a polka-dot dress".[4]