Tirzah Garwood just isn’t as good as her husband

Tirzah Garwood, wife of the more famous Eric Ravilious, is having a well-deserved moment in the sun, benefiting from this era of equality in which artists’ and composers’ wives and sisters (such as Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn and Elizabeth Siddal) are having the spotlight shone on their under-appreciated works.

Garwood is not quite as good as Ravilious, in the same way that Clara and Fanny are not quite as good as Robert and Felix, but she is nonetheless a pleasure to encounter, with an infectious, playful delight in everyday sights of her time, such as uniformed schoolgirls forming a crocodile, prim passengers in a third-class train compartment, or two sisters in a bathroom with a large bath mat that says ‘BATH MAT’. Eighty of her works, ranging from wood engravings to collages to embroidery to oils, are on show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Born in 1908 as Eileen, and nicknamed Tirzah as a variation on ‘Tertia’ because she was the third child, Garwood studied wood engraving with Ravilious at the Eastbourne School of Art, and married him in 1930, even though he was ‘not quite a gentleman’ (according to her autobiography, first published some 60 years after her death). She wrote of his ‘unfamiliar and rather frightening working-class world’. They set up house in Great Bardfield, Essex with Edward and Charlotte Bawden, and became the Great Bardfield Artists.

Both Garwood’s and Ravilious’s lives were to be cruelly cut short. Ravilious, at the height of his artistic powers, was lost over Iceland in 1942, aged 39, when the plane he was in with the War Artists Advisory Committee crashed. Tirzah had just given birth to their third child, Anne. She had breast cancer and a mastectomy that same year, but carried on fitting as much art as she could around motherhood.