Tirzah Garwood Beyond Ravilious

The best ‘temporary exhibitions’ resonate long after the exhibits are taken down and sent back to their institutional or private owners. So it was with Ravilious the reputation-redefining retrospective of the artist and designer Eric Ravilious, held in 2015 at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Curated by James Russell the exhibition was a comprehensive re-evaluation of Ravilious’ career as a painter, from Royal College of Art student under the tutelage of Paul Nash to his fateful final work as a War Artist. As well as being an absolute treat for existing Ravilious fans, the show (and its excellent accompanying catalogue) introduced the artist to a new generation of art-goers and now, ten years on, Ravilious is practically a household name, his work reproduced on everything from tea towels to advent calendars.

Time then perhaps to shift the spotlight and where better to shine it than Tirzah Garwood (1908-51), Ravilious’ wife? And where better to host such a ‘temporary exhibition’ than Dulwich Picture Gallery, the birthplace of the Ravilious renaissance? In Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious James Russell has once again done a brilliant curation, this latest retrospective bringing together over 80 works to reveal Garwood as an accomplished artist and distinctive creative voice. The inclusion of ten watercolours by Ravilious act as a sounding board: illustrating the thematic overlaps in their artistic practice, as well as the points of divergence.

Ravilious and Garwood met as teacher and pupil at Eastbourne College of Art in 1925, where Ravilious taught wood engraving. Garwood proved a precocious pupil – her keen eye for composition and her technical skill meant that only a year after starting her studies she was exhibiting at the Society of Wood Engravers.

The couple married in 1930 and moved to Great Bardfield, Essex in 1931, sharing a house with the artists Edward and Charlotte Bawden for a time before moving to nearby Castle Hedingham. Although the arrival of her three children (John in 1935, James in 1939 and Anne in 1941) must have impacted on her time, domestic demands redirected her creative drive, rather than subsumed it.

Alongside some exquisitely tender drawings of her young children, the exhibition includes a series of decorative marbled papers created by Garwood in the 1930s.  Initially produced in collaboration with Charlotte Bawden, Garwood’s marbled papers became sought after by publishers and interior designers for end papers and lightshades. Garwood relished the challenge and unpredictability of this medium, writing that ‘marbling gave me pleasure because I felt no-one else could do it’. Certainly no one else was doing it quite like her, particularly her eclectic colour combinations and complex, layered repeat patterns. The work – although a welcome income stream – was exacting and so much so that in June 1937 Ravilious was corresponding on her behalf ‘I am writing for Tirzah, who is busy marbling and daren’t stop which the tank behaves itself.’

Recovering from a personal annus horribilis in 1942 (an emergency mastectomy for breast cancer and the death of Ravilious on a mission over Iceland), Garwood found strength and purpose in her creativity. Among the many delights in the exhibition are the ‘sophisticated naïve’ oil paintings she created from the 1940s until her death from cancer in 1951.

While Ravilious preferred to work in translucent watercolour, Garwood enjoyed oils because they allowed her ‘to get things really dark’. The Cock 1944 was her first in this medium, a version of a naïve Victorian painting in which Garwood skillfully controls her composition to anchor the magnificently plumed cockerel into its landscape setting.

Although Garwood wrote that ‘except for a few primitive painters like Henri Rousseau, it is almost impossible to return to the Garden of Eden of unselfconscious work when you have eaten the apple of knowledge’, her oil paintings and the charming three-dimensional collage-portraits of local houses and shops display in the show prove that she was in good company with Henri. Contructions such as Daren, Baker’s Shop 1945-6 are deceptively childlike, Garwood was particularly adept at using the depth of the box frames to help create and cast shadows within the composition, but had fun putting in personal touches, such as the diminutive figure of Anne, inside the shop buying a bun inside.

Garwood was also a skillful needlewoman and the exhibits include charming examples of her work in this medium, including a patchwork quilt made for her friend Peggy Angus as well as an embroidered version of one of her early woodcuts Yawning, a comically self-deprecating self-portrait.

The final gallery in the exhibition is devoted to a series of small paintings made in 1950-1. This was Garwood’s self-styled ‘Happiest Year’, in fact the final year of her life, spent in a rural nursing home dying of the breast cancer that had reclaimed her. By now happily married to her second husband, BBC producer Henry Swanzy, and with her characteristic optimism and determination, Garwood somehow managed to see the positives of her grim situation and seized the creative opportunities that bed rest offered.

The diminutive paintings she made from her sick bed radiate with her imaginative – almost surrealist – vision as well her profound love of nature. These unsettling compositions showcase Garwood’s skill at observing flowers and animals, as well as her talent for juxtaposing such naturalistic subjects with Victorian toy trains and dolls, or even an archaic biplane (as in Springtime of Flight, 1950).

Even in the last days of Garwood’s ‘happiest year’, she was working. Just three days before her death Swanzy reported, ‘Tirzah, quite triumphant, is painting Mrs Noah and the engine Nero under the wonderful driven sky that she noted long since’. The painting, Mrs Noah’s Picnic remained unfinished and although it is among those included by James Russell in this final gallery, it is not the final work in the show. That honour goes to the enigmatic Spanish Lady, a haunting self-portrait in which the artist depicts herself as a statue (based on a Victorian hot water bottle design) in a starlit night garden, a brittle, diminutive figure dwarfed by spectral white daffodils while a pale owl swoops overhead. It is a strange and unsettling painting and the perfect image on which to conclude this enjoyable and justified reappraisal of the overlooked and undervalued Mrs Ravilious.

Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious

Dulwich Picture Gallery

Until 26 May 2025

www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk