British Artist Tirzah Garwood Finally Gets Her Due at Dulwich Picture Gallery

The Julie Andrews song “My Favorite Things” comes to mind when viewing the work of Tirzah Garwood. Cats, dogs, bakeries, children, flowers, and insects are all prominent motifs, whether depicted in drawing, engraving, collage, or paint. It is a comfortable world, but one that still includes social commentary and a sense of fun. For just over two decades, Garwood made the ordinary significant in her work: no subject too trivial to be shown in her dreamlike, though realist, pieces.

However, apart from a memorial exhibition the year after her death in 1952, there has been no exhibition commemorating this British artist. To the art world, for many years, she was more famous for being the wife of the landscape painter Eric Ravilious.

Now, more than 70 years later, the retrospective “Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious” at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, on view through May 26, 2025, shines a light on this once-obscure artist. Curated by James Russell—who was responsible for the major Eric Ravilious watercolor exhibition nearly 10 years ago in the exact same institution—this exhibition seeks to reintroduce Garwood as an artist in her own right. The show consists of artworks primarily from private collections, many of which are being shown to the public for the first time.

“She was so obscure as an artist that institutions were unwilling to take the risk. Thanks to the film about Ravilious as a war artist—alongside the publication of her autobiography in 2012—it’s put her in the spotlight,” said Russell, in an interview with Artsy.

Tirzah Garwood’s early years

Born in Gillingham, Kent, in 1908, Garwood was named Eileen Lucy, but was immediately given a nickname when a relative asked after “Tertia”—Latin for “the third child”—and her two elder siblings altered this to the biblical “Tirzah.” The artist’s parents encouraged her practice, and at 17 years old, she started attending evening classes at Eastbourne School of Art before going full time in 1926. Under the tutelage of her future husband Eric Ravilious, who passed on his enthusiasm for wood engravings, Garwood quickly took to the medium. One of the first works on view at the entrance of the show is an engraving, The Four Seasons (1929), her first to be accepted by the Society of Wood Engravers for exhibition.

Unlike Ravilious, who focused on rural themes, Garwood cast her eye to a subject closer to home: family and domestic interiors. These four black-and-white engravings are witty and lively with an energy that exceeds their small size. One portrays two women getting a house ready for spring, shaking feathers out of a pillow; a family at the beach; another family group playing cards as the weather cools for autumn; and a woman slowly getting out of bed in winter, sleepily trying to place her foot in her slipper.

Tirzah Garwood’s career in London

By 1928, Garwood was becoming known for her distinctive style. She moved to London to study at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and to find illustration work. In her autobiography, she noted that her parents “thought Mr Ravilious was perverting a nice girl who used to draw fairies and flowers into a stranger who rounded on them and did drawings that were only too clearly caricatures of themselves.”

Engravings produced during this time emphasize Garwood’s sense of the surreal. On view in the show next to The Four Seasons, the artist depicts herself distorted in Hall of Mirrors (1928), smiling broadly at her oversized reflection, the contrasting patterns defining textures and surfaces. “She could have depicted herself as a figure of beauty, but instead she decides to show herself yawning, or distorted in a hall of mirrors,” said Russell. “She had a real sense of fun, which you can see throughout the show.”

Garwood’s work also, perhaps, betrays her unease in her new move to the big city. In Kensington High Street (1929), Garwood depicts her stout, respectable aunt stepping into the road, while the artist herself lurks behind. Her face is blocked by her aunt’s body, but is identifiable by the case she is carrying, which bears the initials “TG.” Around these two figures, the city bustles and slender mannequins model the latest fashions in the background, a contrast to Garwood’s provincial garb.

Tirzah Garwood’s marbled papers

In 1930, Garwood married Ravilious. They moved first to a flat close to the Thames, and then to a home in rural Essex, which they shared with fellow artists Caroline and Edward Bawden. This was a challenging time for Garwood, artistically speaking, as their home had a constant stream of visitors, and it was often left to the women to do the domestic work. While she produced fewer wood engravings, she discovered a new passion: marbled paper.

The previous year, Edward Bawden had tried marbling paper, which involved dropping thinned oil paint in a pattern onto a large tray of water with a thickening agent. He’d lay a piece of paper over the pattern and then leave to dry. Caroline and Garwood, both intrigued, tried their hand at this art form. By the end of the summer of 1934, they had their own business. Garwood developed her own distinctive approach, layering delicate repeat patterns that were unlike anything being made in Britain, let alone Europe.

With the 1930s bringing a resurgence of Arts and Crafts interiors, there was a stream of orders for these papers, providing valuable income to the household. Some came from private clients, including Muriel Rose, co-owner of the Little Gallery in Chelsea and one of the era’s arbiters of taste, as well as design shops.

Eventually, Garwood and Ravilious moved into their own house in Castle Hedingham, a town in northern Essex. With the outbreak of World War II, demand for the marbled papers soon dried up and more hardships were in store for Garwood. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in late 1941, and her husband died the following year while he was on active service as a war artist in Iceland.

Tirzah Garwood’s life as a painter

In 1944, Garwood found a new creative surge and took up oil painting for the first time, writing to her friend Peggy Angus that she “believe it may be my cup of tea. I always hankered after it because of being able to get things really dark.”

In the Dulwich Picture Gallery show, the third room marks the beginning of Garwood’s life after her husband. Here, it’s clear that Garwood’s innate playfulness found new life in her paintings, as she explored a naïve style similar to Henri Rousseau. Her first painting, The Cock (1944), in the style of the Victorian artist G. N. Whitehead, shows a cockerel standing large and proud in the foreground with the countryside receding behind him. In Etna (1944), Garwood depicts an East Sussex landscape. It is painted from a low perspective, at eye-level with the chickens, so that the crops are looming over them. The train depicted is a likeness of a tin toy train that belonged to her children, adding a surreal and playful element to the work. In 1946, Garwood married BBC radio producer Henry Swanzy and experimented with collage, presenting cut-and-pasted structures in box frames that added a sense of theater to her artworks.

Tirzah Garwood’s life after Eric Ravilious