Tirzah Garwood

Eileen Lucy "Tirzah" Garwood (11 April 1908 – 27 March 1951) was a British wood-engraver, painter, paper marbler, author, and a member of the Great Bardfield Artists.

According to Brighton Hove museums, Garwood "is one of the most original and distinctive figures of twentieth century British art."

Her work is known for depicting people, places and animals in domestic scenes "caught in a fleeting moment".

Her style is praised for its touches of humor and eccentricity.

Garwood also authored the autobiography 'Long Live Great Bardfield & Love to You All'.

Tirzah Garwood was married to the artist Eric Ravilious.

They collaborated on some projects together, most notably the mural at the Midland Hotel, Morecambe.

During her time with the Great Bardfield Artists, Garwood worked with Charlotte Bawden in creating exquisite marbled papers currently held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Garwood was born in 1908 in Gillingham, Kent, the third of five children born to Ella Agnes (née Corry) (1872–1952) and Frederick Scott Garwood (1872–1944) an officer in the Royal Engineers.

Her name "Tirzah" was bestowed by her siblings, a reference to Tirzah in the Book of Numbers in the Bible, and possibly a corruption of a reference by her grandmother to "Little Tertia", that is, the third child.

She and her family accompanied her father on army postings to Croydon, Littlehampton and then Eastbourne.

Garwood was educated at West Hill School in Eastbourne from 1920 to 1924, and then at Eastbourne School of Art from 1925, under Reeves Fawkes, Oliver Senior and, as a wood engraver, Eric Ravilious.

In the late 1920s, when wood engravings were widely popular, Garwood was recognized as one of the most promising, skilled, and innovative artists of that era.

Her wood-engraving work was highly praised for its intricacy, humor and a hint of eccentricity.

Her father recorded the date of her first engraving, 24 November 1926, in his diary.

Curator of the Towner Gallery, Andy Friends states that Garwood's student work as a wood-engraving shows "evidence of how, in a difficult art, Tirzah almost instantly became an adept peer of her already accomplished teacher – and during 1927 began to exert an influence over his own approach."

One of Garwood's early woodcuts, shown at the Society of Wood Engravers' annual exhibition in 1927, was praised in The Times.

The same year, the Redfern Gallery, in London showed The Four Seasons, a series of Garwood's engravings.

She undertook commissions for the Kynoch Press and for the BBC, for whom she produced a new rendering of their coat-of-arms.

Garwood moved to Kensington in 1928 and later studied at the Central School of Art.

In 1928 Garwood illustrated Granville Bantock's oratorio The Pilgrim's Progress, which he wrote as a BBC commission.

Garwood married Eric Ravilious in Kensington on 5 July 1930.

Between 1930 and 1932 the couple lived in Hammersmith, London, where there is a blue plaque on the wall of their house at the corner of Upper Mall and Weltje Road.

In 1931 they moved to rural Essex where they initially lodged with Edward Bawden and his wife Charlotte at Great Bardfield.

She was painted by Ravilious, in Two Women in a Garden (1932), alongside Charlotte Bawden.

In 1933 they painted murals at the Midland Hotel in Morecambe.

During this time with the Great Bardfield Artists, Garwood was inspired by Charlotte Bawden to experiment with marbled paper.

She created exquisite repeated designs which were used for lampshades and books.

Garwood's marbling work was known for ethereal designs and natural dream-like forms and is currently held at the Victoria and Albert museum in London.

In 1934 they purchased Bank House at Castle Hedingham, in Essex, and a blue plaque now commemorates this.

They had three children: John Ravilious (1935–2014); the photographer James Ravilious (1939–1999); and Anne Ullmann (b. 1941), editor of books on her parents and their work.

After Anne was born in April 1941, the family moved out of the often cold, and sometimes flooded, Bank House to Ironbridge Farm near Shalford, Essex.

During the winter of 1941 Garwood became ill; she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent emergency mastectomy surgery in March 1942.

She wrote her autobiography from March and May 1942, while recovering from the surgery.

While he was travelling for a commission from the War Artists' Advisory Committee, Eric Ravilious's plane went missing off Iceland; it was later determined that he died in a plane crash on 2 September 1942.

His body was never recovered.

The government proved reluctant to pay Garwood the widow's pension she was due or to settle Ravilious's outstanding pay for over a year.

Garwood left Ironbridge in March 1944, and moved with her children to Boydells Farm, near Wethersfield, Essex.

She began painting in oils and resumed her career as an artist.

Originally intended only for her family, the autobiography, Long Live Great Bardfield & Love to You All, was published posthumously, in 2012, after being edited by her daughter Anne.