Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious

This delightful if dark exhibition brings ‘Mrs Eric Ravilious’ out of the shadow of her husband, ensuring that, in future, she is known in her own right as Tirzah Garwood

Tirzah Garwood, Etna, 1944. Oil on canvas. Image courtesy of Fleece Press/Simon Lawrence.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
19 November 2024 – 26 May 2025

by ANNA McNAY

Four decades after Tirzah Garwood’s death, her friend, fellow artist and writer Olive Cook, wrote that, after her marriage to Eric Ravilious in 1930, Garwood “did no more engraving”, and “perhaps the medium of wood engraving was too exacting to combine with the domestic chores which she never found easy or congenial.”¹ Indeed, Garwood wrote in a letter to another friend in 1936: “I always regret that I stopped working because it is difficult with a house to think about.”² Yet, while reiterating in her autobiography that she “had very little time for thinking at all as Eric and I were constantly entertaining and being entertained in the village”, she continued: “Little John and marbling left me fully occupied. All that summer I was aware of being absolutely happy and knew myself to be most awfully lucky.”³ Thus, while maybe ceasing to make wood engravings, Garwood did not cease to make art, and, while she may have been better known as “Mrs Eric Ravilious”,⁴ she was producing work in various mediums before and after her marriage, not to mention during the period when they still presented as a happy couple, but had both fallen in love with other people.⁵ It is apparent, then, why this retrospective exhibition of Garwood’s work at the Dulwich Picture Gallery carries the subtitle “Beyond Ravilious”. Running parallel to Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, both exhibitions seek to portray their subjects as (incidentally female) artists in their own right, rather than defining them in relation to the men in their lives. Dulwich curator James Russell adds to this, writing in his introductory catalogue essay: “The main aim of Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious is therefore quite simple: to reintroduce her as an artist in her own right, exploring her fertile creative relationship with Ravilious before revealing the full range of her achievements.”⁶

Tirzah Garwood. Hornet and Wild Rose, 1950. Oil on canvas. Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne. Image courtesy of Fleece Press/Simon Lawrence.

Again, like Carrington, who left behind a great many letters and journals, Garwood, towards the end of her short life, after first being ill with the breast cancer that ultimately killed her at 42, began writing her autobiography. “I am now determined to write an autobiography for my grandchildren,” she writes. “I suppose that an escape from death generally has that effect on people, only most of them don’t have the time or inclination to really carry out their desire, and in writing as in drawing, I could completely forget my present circumstances. I want to write my life while I am still happy. If I read an autobiography, I don’t like to think of the author as a poor old doddering person with one foot in the grave.”⁷ She wrote in an exercise book in the interlude between being discharged from hospital following a mastectomy and leaving for two months’ convalescence in her hometown of Eastbourne, and the manuscript was later edited by her daughter Anne and published for the first time in 2012. Although disapproved of by Ravilious, who termed her honest and revelatory writing “gunpowder”,⁸ Garwood’s book has since been hailed by Ravilious’s biographer Andy Friend as “a classic testament to the lives and times that Tirzah knew”.⁹

Eileen Lucy Garwood was born in Gillingham, Kent, in 1908, the third of five children. A relative asked after Tertia – the third child – prompting her siblings to begin calling her Tirzah, and it stuck. Her father was a colonel in the army, who had served the British empire as a Royal Engineer in India. The family, which was Presbyterian, upper-class and socially conservative, moved about a lot. Both parents were keen amateur artists, and Garwood studied botany with her mother and insects with her father, chasing butterflies and collecting beetles with her brother John. In her teens, Garwood enjoyed illustrating scenes of fantasy and adventure reminiscent of the Edwardian illustrator Arthur Rackham. Her prize possession was a 19th-century dolls’ house. Eager to escape such upper-class rituals as “the Lawns”, when, on Saturdays, the upper crust of Eastbourne society paraded along the seafront to see and be seen,¹⁰ Garwood was supported by her parents when she wanted to go to Eastbourne School of Art. “At my various schools I had always been considered good at drawing,” she recalls. “But my drawings by now were pretty bad, because they were no longer innocent but influenced by the story-book illustrations of that period.”¹¹ Her father, in his diary of September 1926, recorded his daughter as suddenly “very keen and energetic about the School of Art” and, at the end of November, the appearance at home of “Tirzah’s first woodblock”.¹²

It was at the school that Garwood met Ravilious. He was her tutor, but only a few years older, and their practices evolved alongside each other with reciprocal influence. Friend makes clear: “What [Ravilious], in turn, appreciated was the originality of Tirzah’s work – which singularly did not imitate his own – and her flair for comic realism in portraying people in contemporary situations.”¹³ They were like chalk and cheese in terms of their backgrounds – Garwood, coming from a wealthy family, and attending a good school, where she had been head girl; Ravilious, from the “other side of the tracks” and a chapel-going family, often short of money, with a father prone to bouts of religious mania. Nevertheless, they shared a passion and a vision of the kind of people they wanted to be. In the exhibition, their works are shown side by side, and hers are so full of vim and character that his seem sadly shallow, flat and lifeless. As the contemporary wood engraver Anne Desmet says of Garwood’s Relations series: “There are very few people who can get that sense of movement – that animation – into a wood engraving. It’s all the mark-making going in different directions that makes the work come alive.”¹⁴

Tirzah Garwood. Kensington High Street, wood engraving, 1929. Private Collection.

Garwood achieved early success with her wood engravings, being accepted, in 1927, for an exhibition of the Society of Wood Engravers, and receiving a mention in the Times. “This more than anything,” she wrote, “convinced my parents that they ought to let me go [to London], though they thought my subjects hideous and that Mr Ravilious was perverting a nice girl who used to draw fairies and flowers into a stranger who rounded on them and did drawings that were only too clearly caricatures of themselves.”¹⁵ She moved to Kensington, where she had various aunts looking out for her, and, unlike the majority of her peers, who were not seriously intent on learning to earn a living, Garwood realised that illustration work might become her escape route from the restrictions of her upbringing and the expectations of her parents.¹⁶ The following year, her works were exhibited alongside engravings by Paul and John Nash, and, in 1930, a Studio special edition noted that: “Miss Tirzah Garwood is a newcomer among the wood engravers, and a very welcome one, for she has humour, originality in choice and treatment of subject, and technical accomplishment … a pupil of Mr Ravilious, and she has a streak of his tricksiness, with much irony of her own.”¹⁷ The Studio’s editor, Malcolm Salaman, further described her illustrations as a “nocturnal exchange of feminine confidences, or many other significant studies of feminine types, done with her tongue in her cheek”.¹⁸

Garwood’s “tricksiness” and “irony” were accompanied by an abrasive sense of humour and a literal and metaphorical darkness. As Russell states in his essay: “The innocent-seeming world that Garwood evokes invariably turns out to be more complex and less comfortable than at first sight.”¹⁹ Her early wood engravings of semi-anthropomorphised insects, very close up and magnified, show her keen attention to detail, but carry a vague tremor of threat: for example, who is prey to whom in A Crane Fly and Spider (1927-28)? She was, Friend notes, “sensitive from an early age to unfairness and injustice” and “a shrewd observer both of social mores and the incidentals of everyday life”.²⁰ Her work studied her experiences of society, visualising the modern, and combining this with her interest in spiritualism and occultism, as, for example, in Table Turning (1928), in which a group of partygoers, in black-tie and flapper-style dresses, spread their spider-like fingers across a table at a seance.

Tirzah Garwood. Window Cleaner, c1927. Pen, ink and watercolour. Private Collection.

Pattern is at the heart of Garwood’s work, starting with her early wood engravings. Her use of pattern against pattern against pattern – lines going this way then that, dots, dashes and swathes of bright white negative space – helps build a sense of depth and three-dimensionality. This can be gloriously enjoyed in The Four Seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn (1927) with their clashing wallpapers and carpets, waves and flurries, clothing and animal fur. Garwood employs the same patterns of mark-making – albeit in reverse, with the marks she makes being the marks we see, whereas, with the wood engravings, the areas touched by her tool give rise to the white, empty spaces of the resulting pictures – in her pen, ink and watercolour drawings from the same year, including Window Cleaner, where the sense of depth is imperative to the viewer’s parsing of the image. By the following year, Garwood was manipulating her lines to create yet more depth, as is superbly demonstrated in Hall of Mirrors (1928), where the figure of the woman, demarcated in tight and straight crisscross lines, is opposed to her reflection, where they are curved and spaced further apart to suggest that her suit is bulging.

Following her Society of Wood Engravers successes, and a fortuitous introduction made by Ravilious, Garwood began receiving commissions from the likes of Curwen Press and the BBC, which led to her “dance round the room with joy”.²¹ While on holiday in Brittany, she began an engraving of herself sitting up in bed that went on to become The Wife (1929), in her series The Relations. This was intended to comprise 12 engravings for the 1930 Curwen Press calendar, but the commission was cancelled when the typographer, Oliver Simon, took offence at her line drawing of Rebecca, daughter of Isaac, the rich Jew of York, published in the BBC Ivanhoe libretto, which he deemed antisemitic. Ravilious tried to make light of the rejection’s significance, but it was certainly a knock to Garwood’s confidence.²² The unfinished series, as well as demonstrating, in the words of her second husband, Henry Swanzy, a “passionate revolt against the bourgeois life”,²³ also extends her experimentation with depth of field into early experimentation with perspective. She would later continue this in her collages and bricolages, with a wonderful example in Daren, Baker’s Shop (1945-46), where the handles of the baker’s cart, which should be reaching forwards towards the viewer, are instead extending away into the depths of the picture. This work was voted best in show by young visitors to the inaugural Pictures for Schools exhibition in 1947. The figure of the little girl – Garwood’s daughter, Anne – thoughtfully choosing which bun to buy, is made from pyruma, a type of cement designed for repairing fireplaces. It has been adopted by model-makers, and Garwood’s knowledge of this is testament to her resourcefulness and playfulness.

Tirzah Garwood. Guy Fawkes, c1927. Pen, ink and watercolour. Private Collection.

In 1930, Garwood finally decided to marry Ravilious (ditching her “more societally suitable” suitor and former fiance, Bob Church). While not as entwined in one another’s (love) lives as the Bloomsberries, the couple moved to Brick House, in the Essex village of Great Bardfield, where they shared a house with fellow artists Edward Bawden and his wife Charlotte. Ravilious’s delightful watercolour, Two Women in a Garden (1932), included in the exhibition, shows Charlotte reading and Tirzah shelling peas in the garden. Again, showing her humour and skill, Garwood’s wood engraving Brick House Kitchen (c1932) is a charming and homely picture in which a hen sits on her eggs by the stove, and four cats, each differently patterned, move silently, with their sleek, elongated forms, across the tiles. The drawing Seventeen Cats (c1940s) is a later, more densely populated, drawn version of this. Garwood recalls in her autobiography: “Living like this with Eric and Edward was very hard work and I didn’t have much time to enjoy the country, and I got annoyed with Edward if he was unreasonable which he was almost continuously, being fussy about his vegetarian food and childishly silly about housework, doing nothing unless Eric did exactly the same amount … I determined to do my best with him as I enormously admired his work. I only came to blows with him once when he threw a small fire guard at me and hurt my nose, so I attacked him feeling like murder, but it did no good.”²⁴ She further recalls the constant stream of engagements – “it seems almost impossible that people could cram so much work and entertaining and visiting into one year as we did without getting quite worn out” – and how she was neither “unhappy or happy”, but “longed for a peaceful holiday away from people and housework”.²⁵

Returning to the issue of whether Garwood ceased to work following her marriage, Friend claims: “There was no sudden turning away from engraving, the medium in which she had proved so adept,” but her marriage coincided with “the decline of private press opportunities and a retreat by general publishers”.²⁶ At about the same time, however, it was suggested to Bawden that he should try a method called “marbling” for his wallpaper designs. He didn’t want to, but Charlotte and Garwood began to experiment with making marbled pattern papers. They did not record their exact technique, but it is thought that they used tragacanth gum and oil paints, creating a base with the first dip in the tank and then adding top colours with a second dip.²⁷ Garwood describes having her marbling tank on the copper in the tiny scullery at Furlongs, a house in Sussex belonging to her friend Peggy Angus (whom her father referred to in his diary as “a Bolshie woman” and “the Red Angus”²⁸), where she – among many others – was a regular visitor. As thanks, Garwood marbled wallpaper for the house.²⁹ Cook later wrote: “She quickly mastered the volatile medium and produced patterns the like of which had never been seen, delicate repeating designs which had nothing in common with traditional marbling. The motifs are nearly always based on natural forms, on leaves, frail flowers and grasses, and the freedom and unpredictable character of the medium imbue them with a tremulous, poetic sense of life.”³⁰ Garwood’s papers were bought by the V&A in 1938, and she was soon constantly in demand by the “movers and shakers” of the day. During the second world war, she even sent papers to friends to be used as blackout blinds.³¹ Russell suggests that Garwood would have had to make approximately 150 marbled sheets to earn as much as Ravilious did for a single watercolour, but she was earning nevertheless, and the idea that she gave up her art for her family is therefore clearly misguided. There is a whole section of the exhibition given over to her marbled papers, and they are exactly as Cook describes: “delicate” and “poetic”.

Tirzah Garwood. Train Journey, 1929. Wood engraving. Private Collection.

In 1942, aged 33, and now mother to three small children, Garwood underwent a mastectomy. The surgery was difficult, and she required an emergency blood transfusion. She recalls that, on waking: “I was surprised to find that my immediate reaction was one of regret I hadn’t died. It was only a momentary regret probably caused by my bodily exhaustion … and now I should have to face living for a year or two with fear that the wretched disease might come back.”³² While she was still recuperating, Ravilious, for his third commission as a war artist, was sent to Iceland and was lost in action. Garwood received a telegram from the Admiralty explaining that he had been “reported missing – presumed dead”, but because his death could not be immediately confirmed, she had to wait two years before receiving a war widows’ pension.³³

In 1944, Garwood began painting with oils. While Ravilious had disliked oil paint, which he described as “toothpaste”, she didn’t like watercolours, but was happy with the added shades of darkness she could achieve with oils. The couple had once owned a collection of so-called “primitive” paintings, and Garwood’s first oil painting was a copy of The Cock by GN Whitehead (1882), made in this style. I confess to not admiring her paintings anywhere near as much as her wood engravings; nevertheless, they have a certain fascination about them. Most of her early compositional references came from the illustrated books of her childhood, most particularly from two books by the artist Thomas Crane – At Home (1881) and Abroad (1882) – which presented the world from the point of view of a child. Russell describes some of the resulting paintings as “approachable, straightforward work, yet difficult to decipher”.³⁴ In The Old Soldier (1947), for example, a toy soldier, gun held high, lies fallen in front of a wooden steamroller, overlooked from the balcony of a red-and-yellow house by a maid in uniform. The surrounding plants – clearly recognisable Arum maculatum (cuckoo-pint) in the background and ivy at the front – tower somewhat menacingly above the dolls’ house. The effect is uncanny and unsettling.

Garwood temporarily gave up oils again until the children were at school, following an unfortunate (for both parties) incident where Anne put her nose up against a painting. During this period, she began to collage, make leaf prints (Missionary Hut, 1944-45, for example, uses leaf prints from plantain to create its verdant foliage), and create scrapbooks (one of which is on display in a vitrine and can be viewed page-by-page on the accompanying Bloomberg Connects app). There are two embroideries in the exhibition, one of which – Untitled (Vegetable Garden) (c1933) – shows Charlotte watering her garden, in a composition very close to an illustration in At Home, and also some beautifully tender drawings of her three children – John, James and Anne. As Lotte Crawford writes, in her book on Garwood: “Each stroke of the pencil in these sensitively observed portraits captures a warm maternal love.”³⁵

It is when she begins to incorporate elements of collage, print and texture into her paintings, and to build them up into reliefs, that I become really excited. The only comparison I can think of is the American artist Joseph Cornell (1903-72) with his “shadow boxes”, but Garwood’s pieces are far more intimate and fixed in the realm of a Victorian childhood. Using recessed frames – or sometimes butterfly boxes – she was able to create a space like a toy theatre. In this space, she then built houses. House at Great Bardfield (1945), for example, uses leaf prints and paper collage to create a climbing plant that weaves in and out of a trellis; Semi-detached Villas (1945), on the other hand, uses real lace, not only for the net curtains, but also – and to great effect – for the hedge behind the garden fence; and House at Night (1945) is built from different materials, including plaid (for the house) and corduroy (for the grass and the hedge). Again, Garwood has favourite motifs that recur. The pram with two little girls – modelled on Anne and a friend – in Two Sisters (c1944) (made from coloured pencil on paper), for example, reappears in the collaged AG Peaston, Wethersfield Shop (1945), albeit with a baby in place of the second child, facing in the opposite direction, and being pushed along by a woman. In Pure Cream Ices (1945-46), the collage becomes even more three-dimensional with the incorporation of wood and its VE Day bunting which truly seems to flutter in the breeze. The ice-cream vendor is modelled on Swanzy.

Garwood met and married Swanzy, a radio producer for General Overseas Service for the BBC at Bush House, in 1946. By now, she was returning to oil painting, and, inspired by his family photograph album, she made a number of small paintings, including Family Group (1950) and The Picnic (1948), which brings together many favourite elements: dense foliage, a small dog and a range of idiosyncratic characters, including a schoolboy, a vicar and a banjo player. The Photographer (c1947) uses leaf prints to create a forest, against which three painted figures pose, while a lady photographer prepares to disappear under the black cloth.

Tirzah Garwood. Springtime of Flight, 1950. Oil on canvas. Private Collection.

In the spring of 1948, Garwood’s cancer returned, and, by 1950, she had to reconcile herself with the fact that it had spread and was terminal. She moved into a nursing home in Essex. But she was not dead yet and, in her final year, she completed no fewer than 20 small oil paintings. As Cook wrote: “She went on working even after she had become bedridden. She amazed all her friends by her determination, courage and unquenchable gaiety. She knew her illness was mortal yet declared that this was the happiest time of her life. It was certainly the most fruitful since her student days.”³⁶ Garwood continued to construct her imaginary worlds, peopled by toys, plants, animals and children, unsettling, if not terrifying, in their juxtaposition of scales and perspectives. Prehistoric Encounter (1950), for example, is painted from a low perspective, as if the viewer were kneeling down and observing from ground level. It features a frog, which Garwood and Anne had found in the garden of the nursing home, and a tortoise, brought in by Swanzy. They stand next to a pool of moonlight, gazing at one another. If you look closely, you will discover several ladybirds dotted amid the foliage. This same viewpoint is taken in Charlotte’s Doll and Springtime of Flight (both 1950), which also incorporate “particularly beautiful little spring tulips with alternating pink marks on the backs of the petals”,³⁷ which had been brought to her in the home by friends. The uber-creepy doll, in the former, appears to be tottering towards us, holding her muff. This calls to mind the living dolls in the ballet Coppélia, about which I had recurrent nightmares as a child.

Another anthropomorphised character is the snow woman, who first appears in an ink drawing from 1938 (simply titled Snow Woman) and recurs, along with two companions, in the painting Snowmen at Hedingham (1950). Her same basic form is also seen in the figure of Spanish Lady (1950), which depicts a Victorian clay water bottle, which stood on the mantelpiece in Garwood and Swanzy’s home. The removable stopper is somewhat ghoulishly painted with the artist’s own features.

In Suffragette’s House (1951), the purple-and-green (the colours of the Suffragettes) edifice is surrounded by a circle of fairy-like figures, with cowslips as heads and poppy petals as dresses. They are dancing beneath a wispy dandelion clock, suggesting the passing of time, and Garwood’s knowledge that she was approaching her death. The most deeply dark and symbolic painting, however, is Doll’s House Room (1950). The furniture is based on that with which Garwood had grown up, and the doll figures are renderings of herself and her husband, with Swanzy seated rather comically on a rocking chair, his limbs outstretched, and Garwood small, meek and still in the bed. There is a flavour of the tragicomic, since the pair were indeed powerless and at the mercy of the doctors and her disease, being manipulated like dolls.

Garwood died on Easter Monday, 27 March 1951, a fortnight before her 43rd birthday. She is buried in the county churchyard at Copford, Essex, and Swanzy graciously added Ravilous’s name to her gravestone, which reads: In loving memory of Tirzah Swanzy (Eileen Lucy Garwood), 1908-1951, and of Eric Ravilious, lost in the Atlantic, 1903-1942: artists. Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see.³⁸

Tirzah Garwood. Portrait of Peggy Angus, 1949. Oil on canvas. Private Collection.

Portrait of Peggy Angus (1949), depicting Garwood’s friend in her bedroom, sitting on a patchwork quilt (a gift from Garwood), next to an Alvar Aalto table, surrounded by objects that signified their shared friendships (including, on the wall, two collages by John Piper and a painting of Furlongs by Kitty Church), remained unfinished. Angus completed it ahead of Garwood’s memorial exhibition in 1952.³⁹ The exhibition revealed, as one critic put it, “an exact talent multifariously deployed, at moments curiously arresting in its dreamlike quality of imagination”. Fellow artist Kenneth Rowntree further noted, in his opening address, Garwood’s “vitality”, her “contagious excitement at some new discovery” and her “power at casting spells”.⁴⁰

To allow Garwood the final word, I quote: “Knowing the tremendous odds against this particular me being born, I always feel extremely grateful to something which I call God for having allowed me to win the race with other spermatozoa which resulted in my birth. Having entered the world in such a lucky fashion, I think everyone ought to appreciate it as much as they can and admit and enjoy this extremely marvellous place and not whinge about life in the next world. Personally, I have tried as best I can to examine all the different sensations and experiences and ways of living and, above all, the flowers and insects and animals that I can.”⁴¹ This is a poignant lesson to take away from a spellbinding exhibition and employ in one’s own life and art.

References
1. The Art of Tirzah Garwood by Olive Cook, Matrix #10, winter 1990, cited in Ravilious & Co. The Pattern of Friendship by Andy Friend, Thames & Hudson, 2017, page 132.
2. Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious, exhibition catalogue, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2024, page 4.
3. Long Live Great Bardfield: The Autobiography of Tirzah Garwood, published by Persephone Books Ltd, 2016, page 335.
4. As The Times newspaper reminded its readers a year after Garwood’s death, when it reviewed a memorial exhibition at the Arts Council Gallery in London. Exh cat, op cit, page 1.
5. Garwood reflects on this in her autobiography, writing: “I was standing in the bow window looking at the river and I realised that something had changed in our relationship to one another which would never be restored, I had felt for a few minutes that I hated him and then I knew that the real sadness for me wasn’t that he didn’t love me but that I had ceased to love him. When he came back, he was so upset by what had happened that I didn’t hate him any more, but I didn’t have again that feeling of being a part of him that for four years had been so precious and I realised that we’d been lucky to have loved each other as long as four years.” Garwood, op cit, page 252.
6. exh cat, op cit, page 1.
7. Garwood, op cit, page 422.
8. ibid, page 444.
9. Friend, op cit, page 297.
10. ibid, page 75.
11. Garwood, op cit, page 49.
12. Friend, op cit, page 78.
13. ibid, page 78.
14. exh cat, op cit, page 3.
15. Garwood, op cit, page 108.
16. Friend, op cit, page 75.
17. The New Wood Cut, Studio Special Spring Edition, 1930, page 20, cited in Friend, ibid, page 102.
18. Tirzah Garwood by Lotte Crawford, Eiderdown Books, 2023, page 12.
19. exh cat, op cit, page 14.
20. Friend, op cit, page 77.
21. ibid, page 83.
22. ibid, pages 106-07.
23. Crawford, op cit, page 3.
24. Garwood, op cit, pages 223-24.
25. ibid, page 250.
26. Friend, op cit, page 132.
27. Crawford, op cit, page 26.
28. Eric Ravilious and Furlongs by httpartistichorizons, published 12 June 2020.
29. Garwood, op cit, page 262.
30. The Art of Tirzah Garwood by Olive Cook, Matrix #10, winter 1990, page 6.
31. Crawford, op cit, page 30.
32. Garwood, op cit, page 418.
33. Crawford, op cit, page 32.
34. Tirzah Garwood: Curator’s Talk, by James Russell, online, 27 November 2024.
35. Crawford, op cit, page 30.
36. Cook, op cit, pages 8-9.
37. exh cat, op cit, page 122.
38. Garwood, op cit, page 490.
39. Crawford, op cit, page 40.
40. exh cat, op cit, page 1.
41. Garwood, op cit, page 425.