The Weight of Their Art

In the spring of 1942, the thirty-four-year-old artist and designer Tirzah Garwood resolved to start her memoirs. An accomplished wood engraver, illustrator, and maker of patterned papers, she had already produced an impressive body of creative work, but this was the first time she’d attempted a book. “I want to write my life while I am still happy,” she admits toward the end of the manuscript that was eventually published, many decades later, as Long Live Great Bardfield, & Love to You All: The Autobiography of Tirzah Garwood. Living in Essex with her husband, the artist Eric Ravilious, and their three young children, Garwood was recovering from an emergency mastectomy following a breast cancer diagnosis. Her convalescence had given her the chance to start writing in earnest, which, she explains, “otherwise I should never have had time to do.” 

How to find the time had long been a pressing question for Garwood, as it has been for so many mothers who are also artists. “I always regret that I stopped working because it is difficult with a house to think about,” she wrote to a newly married friend in 1936, encouraging her not to abandon her own painting. Yet in “Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious,” an immaculate show at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, Garwood emerges as an artist who who adapted her practice to her life, painting and modeling her home, her children, scenes from local village life, and the buildings and people that were the backdrop of her daily routines. Even before she was a wife and mother she was drawn to depicting household scenes. Her wood engraving Spring (1927) shows two women cleaning a bedroom, one down on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor, the other plumping a pillow; the illustration Commercial Traveller (circa 1927) has a salesman exhibiting his wares on the doorstep to an audience of women and children.

But as the show’s curator, James Russell, emphasizes in its comprehensive and elegant catalogue, the “main aim” of the exhibition is to recognize Garwood as more than simply “Mrs. Eric Ravilious.” That was how The Times identified her in their review of the Arts Council Gallery’s June 1952 memorial exhibition of her work, a year after her death from cancer at forty-two. Originally held in the spring at the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne, the memorial show generated enough popular demand that it reopened later in the summer in London, but thereafter Garwood’s work was largely forgotten. Her memoir, which she left unfinished at her death, remained unpublished until 2012, when Fleece Press issued an edition edited and with notes by her daughter Anne Ullmann (reprinted in 2016 as Long Live Great Bardfield: The Autobiography of Tirzah Garwood by Persephone Books). Little of her work made it into other shows. Not only is “Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious” the first major exhibition of her work, many of the eighty-odd pieces on display have never before been shown to the public and are loaned from private collections. 

Anyone who thinks they’re familiar with Garwood’s art will surely find the exhibition a revelation. For every piece that’s recognizable—some of her more oft-reproduced wood engravings, for example, or the marbled papers that she made during her marriage to Ravilious, which the Times praised as “among the most delicate and the prettiest that have ever been produced”—four or five are utterly new. Most striking is the breadth and diversity of the work on display: not just those engravings and papers but embroidery, watercolors, oil paintings, two-dimensional paper collages of what amounts to an entire village of houses and buildings in box frames, a patchwork quilt, pencil and ink-wash drawings.

And yet it all coheres as the oeuvre of a single artist. Garwood paid consistently close attention to detail—whether in the precise draughtsmanship of Six Eggs (circa 1945), a color pencil illustration for a children’s book, or in the Wes Anderson–like symmetry of her boxed houses. One can also trace an increasingly prominent note of whimsy. The elegant meticulousness of her early wood engravings—the medium in which she first proved her talents but which she put aside to devote more of her attention to marriage and motherhood—gives way to landscapes and gatherings stranger and more mysterious. 

Garwood was born in 1908, the third of five children of a blonde beauty from Croydon and a royal engineer with what his daughter described as “a romantic nature.” She was christened Eileen Lucy, but when her grandmother sent a letter shortly after her birth inquiring after “Little Tirtia,” she quickly acquired the nickname “Tirzah.” The family moved often due to Colonel Garwood’s military career, but when Tirzah was sixteen they settled permanently in Eastbourne, a Victorian resort town on England’s southeast coast, where she attended the local art school.

There she met Ravilious, a recent graduate of the design school at London’s prestigious Royal College of Art, now teaching in Eastbourne. Five years Garwood’s senior, Ravilious was among a group of young artists identified by their tutor Paul Nash as an “outbreak of talent.” Nash had taught his protégé wood engraving, a medium Ravilious quickly excelled in, and now Garwood too proved a natural: just a year after she made her first piece, her quartet The Four Seasons (1927) was accepted for the annual exhibition of the Society of Wood Engravers (to which Ravilious had been elected in 1920). The recognition helped her convince her parents that she should move to London to study at the Central School of Arts and Crafts.

Garwood arrived in the city in 1928, installing herself in a room in the attic of the Ladies’ National Club in Kensington. Her recollections of boarding house life in Long Live Great Bardfield have the flavor of a Muriel Spark novel. The building is inhabited by spinsters, retired nurses, and women of modest but independent means. “One middle-aged woman had apparently no occupation,” she writes. “She just lived and read novels from the library in an unending stream.” Garwood, by contrast, had come to London with the hope of being able to earn her own living. She recalls dancing “round and round the room with joy” on the “wonderful, wonderful evening” that she was given her first job, with the BBC: in 1929 she designed the crest for the Radio Times, the UK’s weekly television listings guide, for which she went on to produce regular work on commission. 

Garwood and Ravilious married in 1930. Initially wedded life made little difference to her work. She had, she admitted in her memoirs, not “learned anything that was at all useful in a house” in the course of her education, and when they were newlyweds Eric was the more accomplished cook. Garwood did design work for the Curwen, Golden Cockerel, and Kynoch presses and assisted her husband with some of his projects, from doing the fiddly work of cutting away the white backgrounds of the wood engravings he was making for an edition of Twelfth Night to helping him paint murals at the Midland Hotel, Morecambe, in 1933—not that such endeavors were publicly credited to her at the time.  

In 1931 the couple moved to the village of Great Bardfield, in Essex, to share a house with Ravilious’s college friend Edward Bawden and his wife, Charlotte. What the four of them established later grew into a larger, loosely connected community known today as the Great Bardfield Artists. In his group biography, Ravilious & Co. (2017), Andy Friend explains that living and working side-by-side yielded an especially “rich artistic haul” for the two men. Their relationship was equal parts encouragement and healthy competition. They tried to outdo one another by rising earlier in the day, or painting outdoor scenes in the rain, cold, or blistering heat.  

In the background of this rambunctious working partnership was a less frequently cited collaboration between Garwood and Charlotte, who began experimenting together with paper marbling in the winter of 1934. Less often noted, too, is the mutual influence between Garwood’s output in that medium—the elaborate designs and tints she managed to achieve—and the pattern-making in her husband’s landscapes from these years, or the color layering in his lithography. One of Russell’s ingenious decisions is to position such pieces—the show includes eleven of Ravilious’s works—side by side. The free-flowing forms in Garwood’s marbled papers and her use of organic, natural ink tones (sepia, rust-red, black, blue and gray, the softest pink) echo the shapes and colors of her husband’s The Potato Field (1941) and Vicarage in Winter (1935). Look closely at the latter next to Garwood’s papers and the crosshatching of pastel tones in the sky becomes more obvious as a kind of pattern work. 

During their years in Essex both Garwood and Ravilious had romantic and sexual entanglements with other people. He was the instigator, and his first infidelities caused Garwood much pain, but she took solace in her liaison with John Aldridge, a friend of both hers and Ravilious’s and one of the leading artists in their Great Bardfield set. “We made love so perfectly together that it was impossible to think of it as wrong or harmful to anyone else. But we both knew it couldn’t go on indefinitely,” she writes in her memoirs. And it didn’t—Aldridge was also married and had no intention of leaving his wife. Garwood’s and Ravilious’s relationship seems to have survived because neither believed they belonged exclusively to the other. “My loving them,” Garwood writes of the men in her life, “was the important thing and not my possessing them.” In large part this attitude was possible because she and Ravilious so seriously acknowledged the weight of their art.

The gallery’s shape—a pair of compact yet high-ceilinged square rooms and a pair of longer, leaner galleries that run between them—favors exhibitions with a linear narrative, which suits “Beyond Ravilious” well. The first room introduces us to Garwood’s early work. Her wood engravings dominate—some already familiar, others entirely new. Table Turning (1928) uses the medium’s stark black-and-white contrasts to evocative effect: the extraordinary detail of the fabrics worn by the séance’s participants—beading, fringing, gleaming silk and taffeta—momentarily distracts you before you find yourself drawn into the deep dark hole of the table at the center of the image. Hanging by the side of Yawning, a 1928 wood engraving of a woman in a state of morning deshabille, is a colorful, similarly intricate embroidery of the same title from the 1930s. Not only are Garwood’s stitches faultless, down to each individual hairpin discarded on the woman’s dressing table, she also achieves depth and texture by using different fabrics alongside the needlework. From beneath the woman’s robe peeks the lacy hem of her nightgown, and the tousled end of her braided hair is a fluffed-up skein of wool. The fringing of the runner on the dressing table is a fine cream appliqué.

Private collection

Tirzah Garwood: Yawning, 1928

Private collection

Tirzah Garwood: Yawning, circa 1930s

The central galleries showcase Garwood’s talent for working in a range of media: another gorgeous needlework embroidery, of a woman watering her vegetable garden; a quilt; marbled papers; collages; miniature boxed and wall-mounted doll-house-like constructions of village buildings, complete with moving parts. Here too the detail is in the layering of materials. Snipped lace curtains. A leaf print repurposed as a climbing plant, winding its way up a paper trellis. Stonework and miniature cottage loaves on display in the window of a bakery fashioned out of Sankey’s Pyruma (a cement-like substance originally intended to repair fireplaces, but often used by model-makers). Strips of dark forest-green corduroy as a thick hedge—left over, we imagine, from a homemade pair of children’s dungarees; Garwood was a skilled dressmaker who regularly made clothes for both herself and her children.

Garwood’s first child with Ravilious, John, was born in 1935. The demands on her time affected her work, even as motherhood also clearly inspired her. Four years later, in August 1939, she gave birth to a second son, James. War was declared with Germany the following month, and Ravilious was commissioned as an Official War Artist. Their final child, Anne, arrived in 1941, a year before Garwood suffered a series of tragedies. 

First came her cancer diagnosis and treatment, followed shortly thereafter by a therapeutic abortion. (Her doctors considered this unplanned pregnancy inadvisable because it had only been three months since her mastectomy.) In her memoirs she remembers that she was discharged from the hospital still bleeding and too uncomfortable for her and Ravilious to make love, much to their mutual frustration. A week later Ravilious left for the front in Iceland, where, that September, he was killed in action when his plane disappeared over the Atlantic. Neither it nor any survivors were ever found. He was thirty-nine years old.

When he chose to leave, it hadn’t just been out of patriotic duty: he had long wished to paint Iceland’s extraordinary light. “I wondered why I had urged him to go,” Garwood remembers of the morning he left, “and realised that it was because I accepted the fact that his work was more important to him than me and I appreciated this attitude.” 

Garwood mourned her husband’s loss deeply, but it did not destroy her. The exhibition gives a potent sense of something shifting in her artistic practice in the years after Ravilious’s death: a release of light and color in the midst of war, widowhood, and illness, but also a return to the playfulness of her past and the visual landscape of her childhood. Her work from this period draws on elements of traditional Victoriana, as in the large and opulent scrapbook she kept throughout her life: tin soldiers, découpage, cigarette cards, dolls’ houses. 

Toward the end of her life Garwood turned to oils. In the nine years she had left, she married again—to Henry Swanzy, a pioneering BBC producer whose radio program Caribbean Voices introduced writers such as V.S. Naipul and Derek Walcott to the British public—raised her children, and kept working. Anne’s memories of coming home from school during these years are rich with “the smell of oil paint and turpentine,” her mother “reluctantly” finishing work and cleaning her brushes.

In 1948 Garwood’s cancer returned, now advanced and incurable. From the hospital bed in London where she was receiving palliative treatment, she wrote to a friend that she’d been “luckier than most people apart from wishing that I could have had more time for getting on with painting.” Oil on canvas had by then become the sole focus of her creative efforts, perhaps due to necessity—she was confined to her bed and no longer capable of the labor that much of her prior work required. 

The show’s final room is devoted to the oils she executed during her last twelve months, all shot through with a sense of the magical and surreal. The obvious visual comparison is the work of Leonora Carrington, but I’m more inclined to think of the aesthetics of Barbara Comyns. Her own paintings aren’t a patch on Garwood’s, but her charming and strange midcentury novels—which are possessed of a unique kitchen-sink-style magical realism—have long struck me as sharing DNA with Long Live Great Bardfield. Like Comyns, Garwood reports the story of her life crisply and matter-of-factly, conjuring up the essences of the people around her and the intensity of her experiences in swift, simple images, but always with a keen eye for eccentrics and capriciousness. When she and Ravilious first lived together, she writes in one memorable passage, they had a maid who, when she worked at a hotel, had once “accidentally shut a cat in the oven but she smelled his singeing fur in the nick of time.” It’s like something out of Comyns’s novel The Vet’s Daughter (1959). Both women’s storytelling, whether visual or verbal, marries practicality and whimsy, the sinister and the comic. They each retain a strong sense of innocence, often in the face of significant suffering. 

Garwood’s visual otherworldliness isn’t quite the dreamlike fantasy of Carrington’s visions, but rather the stuff of fairy tales and childlike sensitivities: a homecoming to the world of “fairies and flowers” she spent hours painting as a child. Dolls and other toys—train sets and building blocks—feature heavily. So do animals beloved by infants—cats, ducks and geese, even a tortoise. In Snowmen at Hedingham (1950), a smiling family of snow-people stand in front of a warmly glowing red-brick garden wall: mother, father, and child. It makes for a striking contrast with her earlier Snow Woman (1938), an ink and wash creation of notably duller monochrome tones, the air thick and gray. 

While she was painting these final works, Garwood knew she was dying. It’s impossible to see Hide and Seek (1950) without feeling the weight of her mortality. It looks down on the garden of her and Swanzy’s house in London’s Primrose Hill, her children rendered as flashes of color among the high green grass, dense shrubbery, and trees, already at a distance from their mother alone in her sickbed upstairs. She was also often in a lot of pain. Nevertheless her friend Olive Cook related that she she declared this period “the happiest year of her life,” amazing everyone with what Cook described to Anne as “determination, courage and unquenchable gaiety,” letting her work absorb her completely.

Even as her daily life contracted, as the exhibition’s final room testifies, her imaginative world was expanding. As Jennifer Higgie notes in her excellent catalogue essay, Garwood always admired what she described as “the charming distortions of perspectives and proportion, the fantasy and the unexpected beauties of colour that young children produce in their pictures.” Erskine Returning at Dawn (1950) shows the family cat marching home from a night on the prowl, huge and magisterial, taking up the entire foreground of the canvas, throwing off the perspective of the trees on the horizon in the background. In Charlotte’s Doll (1950) the subject of the piece has been posed among a backdrop of tulips that tower above her—a little Victorian explorer deep in an uncharted, exotic jungle. By comparison, in Doll’s House Room (1950) it’s Garwood and Swanzy who’ve been transformed into tiny toy figurines. 

Swanzy features more often on the exhibition’s walls than Ravilious, who appears only in The Vegetable Garden (1929), surveying his crops, hefty marrows tucked under his arms. (Garwood, by comparison, appears regularly in his work.) Perhaps Swanzy’s presence in these scenes simply speaks to his presence in Garwood’s now reduced domestic world, but it also suggests a lack of competition in her second marriage. Husband and wife each had their separate spheres of work, as Garwood acknowledged in her official-looking Portrait of Henry Swanzy (1947), in which he’s sat on a red sofa, dressed smartly in a suit and tie, a copy of the periodical African Affairs beside his right elbow, above which, in the background of the image, a globe sits atop a bookcase and three carved wooden African figurines stand on the mantlepiece.

To see this impressive intellectual shrunk into a toy-sized figure in Doll’s House Room makes for a striking contrast. On first glance it looks like an innocent, benign scene suitable for a nursery wall, but on closer inspection, there’s something decidedly uncanny about this image of humans rendered helplessly inanimate. I’m reminded of Garwood’s eerie early wood engraving, Cat into Wife (circa 1928), in which an otherwise ordinary, cosy, hearthside domestic scene is transmuted into one of terror, the monstrous half-feline/half-human figure sprawled on the floor, the shocked husband watching on in horror. Other colorful, cheerful surfaces in these late works also belie a sense of menace: Weewak’s Kitten (1950), with its ominous black pansies and creepy black cat lurking in the grass, or Suffragette’s House (1951), in which dancing matchstick dolls circle the building like pagans performing their rites in a folk-horror film. 

On first glance, Spanish Lady (1950), the final painting on display, suggests a more serene, sublime metamorphosis. A Victorian clay water bottle in the shape of a crinolined lady with a long, elegant neck, not unlike Garwood’s, stands next to a bed of spring flowers, glowing in a softly moonlit garden. It’s widely acknowledged as a kind of self-portrait in disguise. Garwood has transformed herself into an angelic, eternal statue. Yet the image is strangely haunting, not entirely tranquil. One is reminded that a life was cut short—that an artist was silenced in her prime.