In the age of the blockbuster, it’s rare to get the chance to see art that is wholly unfamiliar. But when Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious opens at the Dulwich Picture Gallery next month, almost everything on display will be new to most visitors. The first major exhibition devoted to the artist, it will include more than 80 works, 90% of which belong to private collections. “She has a lot of fans,” says James Russell, the exhibition’s curator. “It’s the right moment for this show because interest in her has been growing. But most people haven’t had the opportunity to see even the tiniest amount of what she made.”
Garwood, who died in 1951 at the age of 42, has long been better known as the wife of the artist Eric Ravilious than as one in her own right. But the new exhibition is set to change this. It will include the wood engravings she produced at the beginning of her career, the most famous of which is probably The Crocodile (1929), and depicts a line of uniformed school girls; the marbled papers she made after she and Ravilious started spending their summers in Great Bardfield, Essex, where they lived with painter and illustrator Edward Bawden and his wife, Charlotte; and the almost surrealist oils she painted at the end of her life. Ten watercolours by Ravilious, meanwhile, will draw out both their similarities and differences, as well as the ways she undoubtedly influenced him.
“In the 1930s she wrote to a letter to a friend in which she said: ‘I hope you don’t have to give up work like I did,’” says Russell. “And it’s true, that in Great Bardfield, she and Charlotte did most of what needed to be done around the house. But her hands were always busy, and her work was highly original. The marbled papers, for instance, sound like a hobby. But they really weren’t. She was making them in orders of 100 for shops and private clients, and some are now in the collection of the V&A.”
Garwood, the third daughter of a colonel, enjoyed a peripatetic childhood until her father retired to Eastbourne, whose school of art she began attending full-time in 1925 – and it was there that she met Ravilious, a new teacher. He’d been taught wood engraving by Paul Nash, and he passed on his passion for it to her. By 1927, the Society of Wood Engravers had accepted Garwood’s The Four Seasons for its annual exhibition, a piece that was praised by the Times, whose critic noted her “cool, satirical eye” as well as her skilled mark-making, and on the back of this success, she moved to London, hoping to make art her living.
Having broken off her engagement to the son of family friends, she married Ravilious in 1930: a match of which her parents didn’t fully approve (his background was working class). But marriage marked a shift in her life. If she adored Ravilious, Garwood also found herself helping her husband with his engravings and, in 1933, painting alongside him as he worked on the murals he had designed for the Midland hotel in Morecambe, Lancashire – a role that went uncredited.
The couple eventually moved to Essex, but things between them were increasingly complicated. They began a family, but both were having love affairs; Tirzah fell for the painter, John Aldridge, and was heartbroken when he ended things. In 1942, calamity followed calamity. First, Garwood found a lump on her breast, and had to have a mastectomy; and then, in September, Ravilious, by now a war artist, was lost in action when the plane he was in crashed into the sea off Iceland. He was only 39. He would not see his three small children grow up. His wife was grief-struck.
But Garwood was also a woman who was disposed to happiness – something you sense in her work. It was during her stay in hospital following her mastectomy that she began writing, with great enthusiasm, her memoir, Long Live Great Bardfield; and after Ravilious’s death, she soon began painting again. She also remarried, having fallen in love with a BBC producer called Henry Swanzy. Even when her breast cancer returned, she was undimmed. “She was incredibly resilient,” says Russell. “She went through times of great sadness, but she wasn’t at all a sad person.” Garwood herself would describe the last year of her life, in which she produced no fewer than 20 paintings, as her happiest.
Having thought about her so much, where does Russell think she fits in? Is Garwood a missing link in the history of 20th-century British art, or is she a world unto herself? “That’s an interesting question,” he says. “She was never really a part of a group, whatever people say about Great Bardfield, and the surrealism in her later work came from Victorian art, not 20th-century Europe.” Its scope is wide, but this exhibition, he believes, may just be the start. “I’m hoping that younger art historians will take her on. There’s all kinds of other stuff yet to be found out.”
Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious is at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21, from 19 November to 26 May 2025
