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.
