Tirzah Garwood, wife of the more famous Eric Ravilious, is having a well-deserved moment in the sun, benefiting from this era of equality in which artists’ and composers’ wives and sisters (such as Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn and Elizabeth Siddal) are having the spotlight shone on their under-appreciated works.
It’s not profound art but it’s a pleasure to look at, created to delight all ages
Garwood is not quite as good as Ravilious, in the same way that Clara and Fanny are not quite as good as Robert and Felix, but she is nonetheless a pleasure to encounter, with an infectious, playful delight in everyday sights of her time, such as uniformed schoolgirls forming a crocodile, prim passengers in a third-class train compartment, or two sisters in a bathroom with a large bath mat that says ‘BATH MAT’. Eighty of her works, ranging from wood engravings to collages to embroidery to oils, are on show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.
Born in 1908 as Eileen, and nicknamed Tirzah as a variation on ‘Tertia’ because she was the third child, Garwood studied wood engraving with Ravilious at the Eastbourne School of Art, and married him in 1930, even though he was ‘not quite a gentleman’ (according to her autobiography, first published some 60 years after her death). She wrote of his ‘unfamiliar and rather frightening working-class world’. They set up house in Great Bardfield, Essex with Edward and Charlotte Bawden, and became the Great Bardfield Artists.
Both Garwood’s and Ravilious’s lives were to be cruelly cut short. Ravilious, at the height of his artistic powers, was lost over Iceland in 1942, aged 39, when the plane he was in with the War Artists Advisory Committee crashed. Tirzah had just given birth to their third child, Anne. She had breast cancer and a mastectomy that same year, but carried on fitting as much art as she could around motherhood. In 1946, she married the radio producer Henry Swanzy. They moved happily to Hampstead but the cancer came back in 1948 and she died in 1951, aged 42.
Acquainted with that short, clearly punctuated life story, you can fit each artistic phase with its biographical equivalent. The early Ravilious-inspired wood engravings are witty and charming. (Ravilious’s best-known piece is of two Victorian gentlemen playing cricket, which has been on the front of every Wisden since 1938.) Garwood’s ‘Ex Libris’ card depicts her with her back towards us and a spaniel at her side. In another, a window cleaner with a cigarette dangling from his mouth gets on with his job while the sombre businessman at his desk ignores him. The line of schoolgirls in low-waisted tunics could be straight from an Angela Brazil novel.
At Great Bardfield, Garwood became a proficient marbler, dipping paper into an oiled bath. The result is far from Florentine: it’s 1930s modern, with blobs and swirls.
She always had a soft spot for toys. Her oil painting ‘Etna’ (1944) is displayed next to Ravilious’s ‘The Westbury Horse’ (1939), so you can examine their similar but different approaches. Both are set in the chalky South Downs, but whereas Ravilious puts a real steam train in the background of his mesmerisingly pale watercolour, Garwood inserts a toy train called ‘Etna’ into her less atmospheric landscape. The toy train is a bit weird, but it’s her way of seeing the world through a child’s eyes. In her grief after Ravilious’s death, she turned more and more to a youthful, naive way of looking.
She made paper collages of gabled houses (such as ‘Villa at Walton-on-the-Naze’, 1948) and bakers’ shops. These are set inside the frames used by butterfly collectors – just deep enough to include a three-dimensional foreground with a duck stream or a pram cut out from paper. It’s not profound art, but it’s a pleasure to look at, created to delight all ages. Eccentrically, she also did a painting of herself and Swanzy as two dolls inside a doll’s house – stiff-limbed in bed and on a chair. I’m not quite sure what she’s telling us about their marriage. One of the best works in the show is a drawing of six exquisitely depicted white eggs with a border round them, done as part of a counting book for children.
The final room celebrates the final flourish of Garwood’s life. Dying of cancer, she sat in bed and painted prolifically in oils, from a mixture of her imagination and the flowers brought to her bedside. She said this last year was ‘the happiest of her life’. A monoplane flies in a blazing blue sky, recalling the time Garwood saw her first plane during the first world war. The bedside flowers loom large in the foreground. The most poignant item in this room is of children seen from a bedroom window, playing hide and seek in the garden, crouching down in the way hide-and-seek-playing children do, imagining themselves invisible.
Some of the paintings from this year are rather too fantastical for my taste (there’s one of a giant tortoise encountering a frog). Garwood’s reality is far more interesting. Her final, unfinished work (from 1951) is of a doll called ‘Mrs Noah’, plus children, in a featureless landscape, standing in front of a toy train waiting to pick them all up.
Around 90 per cent of Garwood’s work is in private collections, so this is a rare chance to see them and to meet this lively minded artist who died far too young.
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