Within the 73 years since her dying, the artist and printmaker Tirzah Garwood (1908-51) has largely been “Mrs Eric Ravilious”. Now, a decade after Dulwich Image Gallery’s acclaimed Ravilious survey, Garwood takes the highlight in an exhibition that reveals for the primary time the total extent of her expertise and output.
The curator James Russell first noticed Garwood’s work 20 years in the past whereas researching the exhibition that might restore Ravilious to public consciousness. Ever since, Russell says, he has “been on the lookout for a chance to placed on a present; the issue is that she’s so obscure. Even for an neglected artist, she’s extremely neglected.”
Garwood’s second arrived with the 2012 publication of her vivid, witty autobiography Lengthy Stay Nice Bardfield, adopted in 2022 by the word-of-mouth hit movie Eric Ravilious: Drawn to Battle. For Dulwich, which has constantly championed ladies artists from Berthe Morisot to Winifred Knights, the exhibition is a pure step, following on from its 2018 present Edward Bawden, devoted to Garwood and Ravilious’s nice pal with whom they lived at Nice Bardfield in Essex, between 1932 and 1934.
A ‘clear, exact and witty’ fashion
Although profitable earlier than the age of 20, Garwood is principally recognised for the help she gave Ravilious within the early years of their marriage, when she would lower away the backgrounds of his wooden engravings. Whereas she was capable of assimilate his fashion when needed, Garwood’s personal distinctive, unconventional hand, Russell says, is “clear, exact and witty”. The present will characteristic greater than 80 of her hardly ever seen works, from oil work to engravings, sketches, collages, textiles and patterned papers.
Garwood met Ravilious at Eastbourne Faculty of Artwork the place he instructed her within the booming medium of wooden engraving. However her assortment of Victorian books was her formative affect, mirrored in early wooden engravings that reveal her love of pure historical past and aptitude for satire. This culminated in Relations, a sequence of humorous vignettes of on a regular basis life, commissioned in 1930 by Curwen Press, however by no means printed. Although Ravilious was supportive of Garwood’s work, the pressures of marriage and home life diverted her skills to quiltmaking and needlework during which she typically reprised earlier prints.
A transfer to Citadel Hedingham in Essex in 1935 was a turning level, and Garwood established herself as top-of-the-line marblers within the nation, promoting ornamental papers to London’s design outlets, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Diary excerpts from 1941 reveal a terrific work charge, with paper orders jostling with jam-making, the care of a child and two others beneath seven. Ravilious’s dying adopted laborious on Garwood’s breast most cancers prognosis in 1942; from that time on, Russell says, her work “goes off instantly with a bang”, as she switched to grease paints, creating unusual, unsettling scenes that mix a country Victorian fashion with a childlike eye, and typically a realizing dialogue with Ravilious. The Surrealist sensibility gained power within the closing 12 months of her life, her ghostly self-portrait, Spanish Woman (1950), paying homage to Leonora Carrington’s work.
For Russell, these closing works have particular drive. “Was she an necessary artist? To me, in her horrible scenario when she knew she was going to be leaving her kids [in death], she discovered a language to speak about it that was in contrast to anybody else’s. I believe that’s a unprecedented achievement.”
• Tirzah Garwood: Past Ravilious, Dulwich Image Gallery, London, 19 November-26 Could 2025
