Tirzah Garwood was an exceptional artist but had the disadvantage of plying her trade at a time when female artists struggled for recognition. Having married Eric Ravilious in 1930 she followed the…
“The cat wife.” Tirzah Garwood. The new woodcut. 1930.
Tirzah Garwood was an exceptional artist but had the disadvantage of plying her trade at a time when female artists struggled for recognition. Having married Eric Ravilious in 1930 she followed the…
This article, written by Olive Cook, first appeared in Matrix 10, published by The Whittington Press in Winter 1990. It is reproduced here with permission. Olive Cook was a close friend of Tirzah G…
Tirzah Garwood (Mrs. Tirzah Ravilious). One of twelve specimens of marbled lining paper, second quarter 20th century.
Tirzah Garwood, The Wife, 1929 People who have delved a bit into the world of Eric Ravilious may know that his wife Tirzah, nee Garwood, not only tweaked one or two of his best-known paintings but was also a fine artist in her own right, and an excellent printmaker. The range and energy of her work is impressive, particularly given that she abandoned printmaking after marrying Eric and devoted herself with great dedication to her children. Despite being widowed and fighting cancer she produced (and sold) marbled papers, paintings and relief works in paper. She shared - and no doubt fuelled - Eric's fascination for toys and dollhouses, creating haunting interiors. She also shared the fate of many female artists, that of being overlooked by people fascinated by her famous husband's work. The imminent publication of her diaries should shift the balance a little, since she was an outspoken, observant and energetic writer. So too will the exhibition currently showing at the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden, which features: wood engravings, box constructions and paintings by Tirzah Ravilious, oils paintings and pots by Charlotte Bawden, and remarkable marbled papers by both artists, often working together at the kitchen table. Sheila Robinson invented the cardboard cut and there are a number of these together with an unpublished book Seven Dancing Princesses. Lucy, the first wife of John Aldridge, was a rag rug maker and one of her pieces is on show together with a portrait of her at her work. Marianne Straub had a distinguished career in woven textiles and there are examples on display. Many people will have sat on her work while riding on London Transport's buses or Underground trains.
Tirzah Garwood was an exceptional artist but had the disadvantage of plying her trade at a time when female artists struggled for recognition. Having married Eric Ravilious in 1930 she followed the…
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The name of Tirzah Garwood may well seem vaguely familiar, because it is unusual enough to stick in the mind. And I know some readers of this blog will recognize it immediately as the unmarried name of Tirzah Ravilious, who was married from 1930-1942 to the artist Eric Ravilious, and from 1946-1951 to Henry Swanzy. Tirzah Garwood, Yawning Wood engraving, 1929 Eileen Lucy “Tirzah” Garwood was born in 1908 into a conventional middle class background in Eastbourne, East Sussex. Attracted by the artistic life, at 18 she enrolled in a class in wood engraving at the Eastbourne College of Art. The teacher was Eric Ravilious, who was also born in Eastbourne, though by this time he was living either with Douglas Percy Bliss in London or with Edward Bawden in Great Bardfield. Tirzah Garwood, Kensington High Street Wood engraving, 1929 Tirzah’s first wood engraving was made on 24 November 1926. By 1927 she was already exhibiting engravings at the Redfern Gallery, London. Over the next four years she was widely recognized as one of the most promising wood engravers of the day, and this at the height of the wood engraving boom. Her work received praise in both The Times and The New Statesman; examples were included in The Woodcut: An Annual for 1929, and (reproduced) in The New Woodcut, a special number of The Studio, in 1930; commissions flowed in from the Curwen Press, the Golden Cockerel Press, the Kynoch Press, and the BBC. Tirzah Garwood, The Dog Show Wood engraving 1929 There is a 1987 catalogue raisonné of Tirzah Garwood’s wood engravings, compiled by her daughter Anne Ullmann. Unfortunately I haven't been able to see a copy of this before writing this post; when I do, I may need to revise. It lists 43 wood engravings, the bulk if not the whole of a small but perfectly formed body of wittily observed and technically accomplished wood engravings. Tirzah Garwood, The Crocodile Wood engraving, 1929 The title of Anne Ullmann's book is The Wood Engravings of Tirzah Ravilious. While I understand the reasoning behind the choice of title, there is a delicious irony here that my female readers will immediately grasp. For there are simply no wood engravings by Tirzah Ravilious. All her engravings were made between the ages of 19 and 23. After she married Eric Ravilious in 1930, she produced no more. Various reasons are given for this. It is nothing so simple as Eric standing in her way; indeed it was he who introduced her work to Herbert Furst, the editor of The Woodcut, and to Harold Curwen and others. Probably she simply found that she no longer had enough time to devote to such a painstaking art. But I suspect that, as with Marion Dorn and Ted McKnight Kauffer, there may have been a tacit wifely understanding that a sense of artistic rivalry might not be conducive to marital bliss. And her engraving The Wife, published three months before her marriage, implies, I feel, a certain fearfulness about what becoming a wife might entail. Tirzah Garwood, The Wife Wood engraving, 1929/30 Following her marriage, Tirzah Ravilious’s artistic impulses were channelled into making beautiful marbled papers (see two lovely examples here), in collaboration with Charlotte Bawden (Tirzah and Eric were living with the Bawdens at Brick House, Great Bardfield). Then came the war. Eric Ravilious was lost over the Icelandic ocean while flying as a war artist observer on an air-sea rescue mission on 2 September 1942. Tirzah, was left a widow with three children, denied a war pension as her husband was not a combatant and his rank in the Royal Marines was honorary.Tirzah Garwood’s early promise was fulfilled not in art (though she did achieve wonders in her highly original marbled papers, and also make some small oil paintings, and some 3D paper sculptures) but in her marriage, her children, and her friendships. Even here, there was heartache. Eric Ravilious took a mistress, Helen Binyon; Tirzah developed breast cancer. She was recovering from a mastectomy when the news arrived of Eric’s death. After her remarriage in 1946 to Henry Swanzy, who worked for the BBC, her cancer returned, and she died in March 1951, at the age of 42. Tirzah Garwood, The Big Man Wood engraving, 1930/31 If this all sounds tragic, one has to set against it the memories of those who knew Tirzah as a vibrant and life-enhancing presence. Her friend Olive Cook, in an article on “The Art of Tirzah Garwood” published in Matrix 10 (the text of which is available here) remembered that, “After an absence of close on forty years her presence remains extraordinary and poignantly clear. Light boned and quick moving, she had the figure of a Botticelli angel, a pale, mobile, rather long face framed in wavy brown hair, a wide mouth and dark vivid eyes, shining with intelligence and full of half mocking humour.” Tirzah Garwood, The Defeat of Apollyon Wood engraving, 1928 I have been on the lookout for engravings by Tirzah Garwood; her work is, as you might expect, quite hard to come by. But I have managed to acquire impressions of 9 of her engravings. All of my prints are contemporary lifetime impressions, but in 1989 two of her engravings were reprinted from the blocks by Ian Mortimer at I.M. Imprimit in an edition of 500 copies for Merivale Editions. These were The Crocodile and The Dog Show - two of her finest works. These two, High Street Kensington and The Wife were all published in The London Mercury in 1930; they probably all date from the previous year. As I understand it, her last published engraving was the frontispiece she supplied for The Big Man by L.A.G. Strong, published in 1931, but probably executed the previous year. Tirzah Garwood, Vanity Fair Wood engraving, 1928 My earliest wood engravings by Tirzah Garwood are the three she made in 1928 for Granville Bantock's oratorio inspired by Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, commissioned by the BBC. While these are strongly composed and show real talent, I can't feel that this commission played to her strengths. There is no room here for her gleeful observation of middle class life, so strongly present in my other examples of her work. Tirzah Garwood, The Dream Wood engraving, 1928 Except as the wife of Eric Ravilious, Tirzah Garwood has been almost forgotten. She has no place, for instance, in Albert Garrett's British Wood Engraving of the 20th Century. Patricia Jaffé's Women Engravers reproduces The Dog Show, but does not mention her in the text so far as I can see (there is no index). The only book I have that gives her her due is Joanna Selborne's wonderful British Wood-Engraved Book Illustration 1904-1940. Selborne describes the 8 prints completed by Tirzah Garwood for an unpublished Curwen Press calendar, to be titled Relations, as "probably her finest wood engravings and among the most vivid portrayals of 1920s middle-class life by a contemporary practitioner." Four of these subjects, illustrated above, are The Crocodile, The Dog Show, Kensington High Street, and The Wife. Olive Cook's article tells us that the "masterful figure dressed in the height of winter fashion" who is about to cross the road in Kensington High Street is one of Tirzah's aunts, near whom she was living in London while studying at the Central School of Art in 1929. The rather cowed girl trailing in her wake is carrying a briefcase marked with the initials T.G.
Tirzah Garwood was an exceptional artist but had the disadvantage of plying her trade at a time when female artists struggled for recognition. Having married Eric Ravilious in 1930 she followed the…
Tirzah Garwood was an exceptional artist but had the disadvantage of plying her trade at a time when female artists struggled for recognition. Having married Eric Ravilious in 1930 she followed the…
Tirzah and Eric Ravilious painting a mural at the Midland Hotel, Morecambe Artist couples are fascinating. Like the rest of us they have a public life and a private life, only the hidden world of an artist couple or family is often revealed - if only in tantalising glimpses - in correspondence, diaries and in artworks themselves. In some cases the relationship has proved inspirational to both halves of the couple, but often one artist's work tends to pushed into the background as the career of the other takes off. Still going strong in 2012 The history of 20th century British art is rich in artist couples. There are those who, like Gilbert and George, have pooled their identities to form an artistic double act and others, among them Mary Fedden and Julian Trevelyan, who succeeded in maintaining parallel careers. This was true too of Ben and Winifred Nicholson, a couple whose artistic relationship long outlived their marriage; they were still busily writing to each other about painting decades after splitting up, although you wouldn't know it to judge from the books about Ben. I was at the Central Library in Bristol the other day - it has a wonderful art history collection - and on asking about Ben Nicholson in the Reference section was presented with a trolleyful of books, each one progressively bigger and glossier and less comprehensible. His first wife merited a solitary book. Personally, I think Winifred's best work is beautiful. I also think the importance of intimate relationships is underplayed in conventional art history, which tends to consider artists in terms of similar artists and via the art historical theories of the day. An artist is only 'important' if they fit within the narrative - but you don't need me to tell you that... Winifred Nicholson, Bonnie Scotland, 1951 (Tullie House) Eric Ravilious was virtually invisible ten years ago and is now a central figure in the alternative story of 20th century British art that Alexandra Harris has championed in her 2010 book 'Romantic Moderns'. The exhibition of his watercolours which opens at the RWA in Bristol next week will be the third show in consecutive years, each one given little attention in the national press but attracting unprecedented numbers of visitors nonetheless. Tirzah Garwood, The Train Journey, 1929-30 His work also features in a second exhibition opening this month, at the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden, but he is not the main subject. 'Long Live Great Bardfield!' is a show about Rav's wife, Tirzah, and the creative force behind it is Anne Ullmann, their daughter and the author/editor of several stunning books about them. Over the past few years she's been editing her mother's autobiography, 'Long Live Great Bardfield, & Love to You All', which is about to be published by the Fleece Press. Eric Ravilious, Train Landscape, 1939 (Aberdeen Art Gallery) I've written before about Tirzah, who learned wood engraving from Eric and as Tirzah Garwood became an outstanding printmaker in her own right. She gave this career up to concentrate on raising her children, but didn't give up art per se. Throughout her married life she made marbled papers, which at different times she sold through London boutiques, and she also assisted Eric, publicly when he was commissioned to paint murals at the Midland Hotel, Morecambe, and privately in ways we will probably never fully appreciate. Her contribution to the painting 'Train Landscape' (1939) is one of my favourite instances. Tirzah Garwood, Orchid Hunters in Brazil, 1950 - there's a story to this... After Eric's death she took up oil painting and also made a series of unusual relief pictures of shops. This work is rarely shown, except at the Fry, and the appearance of two examples on the Antiques Road Show last year caused some consternation to their resident expert. Now we have the opportunity to look at Tirzah's work properly and also to read what she thought about married life with Eric. Famous for her fiery letters, I suspect that she had a thing or two to say... 'Eric Ravilious: Going Modern / Being British' is at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, from Saturday March 10th. 'Long Live Great Bardfield!' opens at the Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden, on March 31st. Wood engravings by Eric Ravilious are included in an exhibition of work from the archive of the Society of Wood Engravers, showing until March 23rd at Manchester Metropolitan University. 'Ravilious in Pictures: A Travelling Artist' will be launched at the RWA on March 10th, 12-2pm
It seems that having "Royal Wedding" in the title of a blog post certainly brings in more readers! I can't keep doing that however tempting, so it's time to move on! As my enthusiasm for quilting is still zilch and the Royal Wedding quilt is languishing in my pending basket, I' m having to enthuse over other favourite things. One of them being the work of Eric Ravilious, who as an official War Artist, was lost on a mission over Iceland in 1942. This now means that everything he did, and he was extremely versatile, is extremely collectible and so, very expensive. Naturally because I love jugs and mugs, I particularly like the very distinctive commemoratives he designed for Wedgewood. This Gardening jug is now mega bucks, if you can find one - He married one of his students, Tizah Garwood, and last Sunday her niece brought two of her pictures to the Antiques Road Show at Winchester Cathedral. I love naive pictures and I was totally charmed with this one - Tizah was well known, in her own right as a wood engraver, but of course her reputation was and is considerably overshadowed by Eric's fame. Later in her life she did oil painting, a medium that Eric never mastered and she certainly seems to have developed a very different style to her wood engravings. Paul Atterbury, the Road Show expert, was, I thought, rather condescending about her paintings. He liked them, particularly the one I have shown above and valued it at £5,000, rather than a couple of hundred pounds for this one - This seemed to be mainly because it chimed with the subject matter of some of her husband's work, as he had done a series of railway images. It certainly was the most colourful but I like the other too. Very unfair I think! This picture doesn't really do it justice as it was extremely detailed and almost three dimensional. In the meantime, her grandson, Ben Travilious, has put out an appeal for information on the whereabouts of many of her paintings, there are quite a few of them on the list. Do take a look - you never know, you might have one in the attic! http://www.ericravilious.co.uk/
