Artist or Wife? Tirzah Garwood in the 1930s

Staying in the first half of the twentieth century, I have recently read Long Live Great Bardfield: The Autobiography of Tirzah Garwood, which was edited by Garwood’s daughter, Anne Ullman, and published by Persephone Books in 2016. Although a significant artist in her own right, Garwood is mostly remembered today as the wife of the more famous, Eric Ravilious. Her own story of her life, much of which describes the time spent living amongst a group of artists in Great Bardfield, Essex, offers many of the usual explanations of how her work became secondary to that of Ravilious, although that probably wasn’t her intention.

The question of readership is an important one for autobiographies: for whom is the author writing? But there is no ambiguity here. ‘I hope dear reader that you may be one of my descendants,’ she notes, writing as she recovered from a mastectomy in 1942, no doubt anxious about her own mortality. Indeed, at times it does not feel like a book written for general consumption, but it does serve to illustrate the more general challenges faced by a woman artist at a time when her own work would always come second to looking after her family.

Garwood was born in Kent in 1908 and grew up in Eastbourne against a backdrop of the First World War. She studied at Eastbourne School of Art 1925-28 where she was taught by Ravilious. They married in 1930, despite coming from very different social backgrounds. The striking wood engravings that she produced in the late 1920s seem to disappear after her marriage and the pages of the autobiography are filled with domestic details and anecdotes about the couple's many Bohemian friends . Without doubt she creates a complete and diverse world. The reader is a fly on the walls of this artist community full of complex relationships and intrigue. But the marbled paper that dominates her artistic output in the 1930s feels like a project that can be fitted in around running a house and later looking after children, while Ravilious flits about the country producing his watercolours and flirting with infidelity. In 1942 Garwood notes, ‘I haven’t the time to do anything except look after the children, I can only scribble this.’ (425). That familiar story...

Ravilious was killed in the autumn of 1942 when his plane disappeared while on a search and rescue mission in Iceland. Garwood later remarried and in her final years painted in oils, offering an indication of what she might have done given more time, but she died in 1951 at the age of only 42. Her first major retrospective, Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious, can currently be seen at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. It contains some interesting work, but for me the subtle message of the exhibition echoes that of her autobiography; it is the story of a woman who might have done so much more had she not lived in the shadow of her husband, and who sadly ran out of time too soon.