The Satirical Perspective of Tirzah Garwood: ‘Blessed Be the Eyes that See the Things that Ye See.’
Tirzah Garwood - The Crocodile
I recently attended an excellent exhibition of the art of Tirzah Garwood. (The Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 26 May)
Garwood was a wood-engraver, paper marbler and painter, who approached her work with a sharp mind, a sensitive touch and a satirical eye. She prompts us to see the amusing, absurd and uncanny in the detail of everyday life.
Eileen Lucy Garwood was born into a military family in Gillingham in 1908. She acquired the nickname Tirzah as a corruption of Tertia, Latin for ‘third child’. Having grown up in the various towns of southern England where her father was posted, she studied at the Eastbourne School of Art. There she was taught wood-engraving by Eric Ravilious, whom she married in 1930.
Garwood’s engravings were imaginatively conceived and precisely executed. They abounded in wry observations and witty juxtapositions.
Here’s a young Garwood on a trip to Kensington High Street with her formidable aunt. The shoppers, wrapped up against the cold, pass comically posed mannequins in summer fashions. Back at home, in her comfortable dressing gown and slippers, an older Garwood stretches and yawns extravagantly, as her contented dog sleeps at her feet. Here a cloche-hatted Garwood, in a neat pussy-bow blouse, sits in a third-class railway compartment. She clutches her purse to her lap, wide awake and alert, as the two suited men opposite take a snooze. Meanwhile her bald, moustachioed father, concentrates on composing a letter at his desk, closely observed by a flat-capped window cleaner. And Ravilious stands enigmatically in the garden, in a trench coat and fedora, a marrow under each arm.
Garwood’s conservative parents were suspicious of working-class Ravilious and the influence he was having on their daughter.
[My parents] ‘thought my subjects hideous, and that 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.’
Tirzah Garwood - The Train Journey 1929. Wood engraving. Private collection
Garwood’s theme was not just her family. More broadly it was mid-century English society. She shows us the domestic rituals, the complex relationships, the contours of class and gender.
As a group of uniformed schoolgirls marches along the street in a crocodile, one pupil gives an affectionate pat to an attentive black terrier. Formally dressed partygoers conduct a séance, concentrating intensely as they reach out their hands in the dark. A lady marvels at her distorted reflection in the Hall of Mirrors. A young woman chats to her sister as she bathes. And granny plays an ace at the card table.
Garwood’s gaze is always acute, amused, affectionate.
Garwood and Ravilious set up home in rural Essex, where they had three children.
Increasingly, her time was taken up with childcare and domestic tasks. Her art took a back seat.
‘I always regret that I stopped working because it is difficult with a house to think about.’
Tirzah, 1950, Photograph by Edwin Smith. Private Collection
Nonetheless, Garwood still found time to take up paper marbling for lampshades and books. This involved dropping blobs of thinned oil paint onto a ‘bath’ of gum-thickened water, and then teasing patterns from it with a stylus. Her nature-inspired designs were fragile, complex, harmonious, and became popular with London interiors shops.
‘Marbling gave me pleasure because I felt no-one else could do this.’
Garwood clearly had a restlessly creative mind. At the exhibition you can see a scrapbook filled with her fantastical cuttings and illustrations. There’s also a patchwork quilt, a design for a children’s counting book, a series of ‘portraits’ of local village houses, and some charming ink sketches - including one of a melancholy snow woman in the back garden. She effortlessly crossed the divide between art, craft and design.
Tirzah Garwood - Window Cleaner c.1927, pen, ink & watercolour. Private collection
While still in her thirties, Garwood suffered a double blow. In 1941 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had emergency mastectomy surgery. The following year, while Ravilious was serving as a war artist, his plane went missing off Iceland. His body was never recovered.
Garwood later wrote that she endured ‘spasms of dreadful sorrow because Eric wasn’t there to share some joke, or some odd occurrence… and worst of all, to appreciate the children.’
Two years after her husband’s death, Garwood began painting in oils. She developed a style that was both sophisticated and naïve. A seemingly innocent world of toys, animals, flowers and insects is haunted by anxiety. A kitten looms over a toy castle by a row of black pansies. A goose in a field rears up as she senses a threat to her goslings. Seen from above, a group of children play hide and seek in a garden in deep shadow.
In 1948 Garwood was again diagnosed with cancer, and, with no hope of recovery, she was subsequently admitted to a nursing home. Often in pain from her therapy, she nonetheless completed some twenty small oil paintings. She described her last year as the happiest of her life.
Tirzah Garwood died in 1951 and was buried in Copford. Her gravestone reads:
‘Blessed be the eyes that see the things that ye see.’
Luke 10:23
'Each little day is a world of its own,
Each little day is a tomb.
Whenever the day has drifted away,
It's back to the womb .
As I lie alone in the darkness,
Waiting the next rebirth,
I say for me what could very well be
For everyone else on earth.
Could be the first day of the best of my life.
There could be sunlight, there could be rain.
But losing or winning, this is beginning all over again.
This is the birthday of a brand new start,
Change of direction, change of heart.
When I think of today, I feel tempted to say,
Destiny, do your worst.
Of the rest of the days of the rest of my life,
This is only the first.’
Molly Drake, 'The First Day'
No. 504
