Tirzah Garwood gained her first name by being a third child. When a family friend asked Colonel and Mrs Garwood after the health of their number three – little tertia – her elder siblings, tickled by the word, nicknamed her “Tirzah”. For most of her adult life, however, she was condemned to being second. As the wife of Eric Ravilious, she not only lived with a more famous artist but was also restricted by wifehood and motherhood. She tucked her own art into the background, but not without a struggle. As she wrote in a letter to a friend in 1936: “I always regret that I stopped working because it is difficult with a house to think about.”
Garwood (1908-51) is now, belatedly, being put first. The exhibition of her work at Dulwich Picture Gallery is a delight and demonstrates that her invisibility is unjust. She is revealed as an artist of variety, charm, humour and sometimes slightly unnerving depths.
She and Ravilious met when Tirzah took evening classes at the Eastbourne School of Art where he was a teacher. With his help, Garwood’s facility for wood engraving – a form revived in the early decades of the century by a group of mostly women artists – became apparent and she quickly began to win commercial commissions. Her prints also show a gift for satire and the self-depreciation that didn’t always serve her well.
Garwood was a willowy and handsome woman but she portrayed herself dishevelled and yawning, distorted to ballooned proportions in a fairground mirror, or, in a book plate, as faceless and turned towards a window with the blinds drawn down. In portraying the well-to-do domestic world in which she had grown up, she wasn’t afraid of poking fun at herself too.
She and Ravilious married in 1930, a step down in social standing for her, but they settled into a fruitful life. They would play rummy after lunch with the loser’s forfeit being clearing-up duties. Work was sometimes a joint business: although she sidelined her own career, she nevertheless helped Ravilious paint a series of now lost murals in the Midland Hotel in Morecambe in which her interest in doll’s houses and Victorian children’s books was evident. She would assist him by cutting away backgrounds for his woodcuts. Some of his more abstract and patterned designs were probably hers as well – he would draw a bit, she would add to it.
Garwood did, however, continue her own work. In 1931, the Raviliouses moved to Great Bardfield in Essex with Edward Bawden and his wife, and it was Charlotte Bawden who encouraged Tirzah to start making marbled papers for sale. These show both her eye for the decorative and her mastery of the difficult technique of dripping and combing colours on a bath full of thickened water and laying paper on top, often in a repeated process, to create abstract designs of colour and complexity: the sheets sold for two shillings a piece.
This concern with all-over pattern, a product of her wood engravings, is there too in a wonderful monotone ink and wash picture of a snow woman, made in 1938 when Tirzah and Eric had moved to nearby Castle Hedingham. It shows their back garden with the silhouette of the castle over the wall, flakes falling and footprints in the snow. There is a hint, however, of something less quotidian in the snow woman, a slightly attenuated and haunted figure with a melancholy expression that is, in fact, another of her self-portraits.
This strange undercurrent would reappear more strongly in the oil paintings she started to make after Ravilious died in a plane crash off Iceland during the war. He had disliked oils – “like painting with toothpaste” – but she used them to produce otherworldly and unclassifiable images. She conjured up a domain of toy trains and doll figures, quirky village houses (which she also made in cut paper and collage and mounted in deep box frames), a monumental cat padding at night, pastiche Edwardian family photographs, hedgy landscapes patrolled by giant hornets where the scale is skewed and flowers and bugs burgeon. It was as if she shrank herself to Lilliputian size and looked at the world from among the grass, with shrubs as tall as trees and frogs as big as elephants.
Shortly before Ravilious died, Garwood had been diagnosed with breast cancer and despite a mastectomy the malignancies returned. In the last year of her life she made 20 small paintings containing her personal jumble of motifs speaking of memory and childhood, innocence and experience. Naive and clearly influenced by folk art and Henri “Douanier” Rousseau, the pictures are really examples of English surrealism.
Garwood’s second husband, the BBC producer Henry Swanzy, recalled her at work on them with “an absorption I have seen in no other human creature”. That absorption in giving form to her imagination is everywhere apparent. Her dying year was, she said, the happiest of her life, and something of that is apparent in these images of her singular world too.
[See also: The paradoxes of Frank Auerbach]
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