DESPITE three retrospective exhibitions, one at the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne in 1952, a year after her death, followed by another at the Arts Council in St James’s Square, London and a third more comprehensive show at the Towner Art Gallery in 1987, the name of Tirzah Garwood is still little known beyond the circle of her family, surviving friends and a few passionate admirers. Her achievement has been overshadowed by the fame of her brilliant husband, Eric Ravilious.
The exotic name by which she was always called came from Tertia, given her because she was a third child; but she was christened Eileen and, curiously, this was as expressive of one aspect of her personality as Tirzah was of the sense of adventure, of rare distinction and of faint, intriguing aloofness felt in her company. After an absence of close on forty years her presence remains extraordinarily and poignantly clear. Light boned and quick moving, she had the figure of a Botticelli angel, a pale, mobile, rather long face framed in wavy brown hair, a wide mouth and dark vivid eyes, shining with intelligence and full of half mocking humour. Her sharp awareness and relish of human oddities and foibles, the caustic wit and occasional dottiness which delighted her friends were combined with qualities more characteristic of Eileen than of Tirzah the most disarming simple heartedness, absolute integrity and a surprising regard for propriety. It was not altogether unexpected to learn that this enchanting creature had been head girl at West Hill School, Eastbourne.
Tirzah was born in 1908, the daughter of a retired lieutenant-colonel of the Royal Engineers who had settled in Eastbourne. In 1925 she became a student at the Eastbourne School of Art. Her masters in painting were Reeves Fawkes and Oliver Senior but for most of the three year course she worked as a wood engraver under Eric Ravilious. The date of her first engraving, 24 November 1926, is recorded in her father’s diary. A series of engravings, The Four Seasons, was shown at the Redfern Gallery, London as early as 1927 and in the succeeding year work included in the annual exhibition of the Society of Wood Engravers was praised in The Times. Among these engravings were two illustrations of fables of La Fontaine, Cat into Wife and Women and Secrets, the temper of which, wise and sardonic at the same time, must have been particularly congenial to the young artist. Cat into Wife was published in 1930 in The New Woodcut, a special number of The Studio. An outstandingly original engraving, Yawning, appeared in The Woodcut for 1929, edited by Herbert Furst, and was singled out in a review in The New Statesman.
In that same year Tirzah went from Eastbourne to the Central School of Art, staying in Kensington near two aunts, one of whom, a masterful figure dressed in the height of winter fashion, appears in the spirited engraving of Kensington High Street dated 1929. She is about to cross the road followed by a subdued girl carrying an attaché case conspicuously labelled T. G., while in the background an elderly woman shopper is irresistibly attracted by a window display of glamorous twenties evening dresses. This engraving was one of a remarkable series called Relations, Tirzah’s hilarious idea for a calendar commissioned by the perceptive Oliver Simon of the Curwen Press. Other commissions came at this time from the Golden Cockerel Press, the Kynoch Press, for whom Tirzah designed borders and repeat patterns as well as making engravings for illustrations, and from the BBC who invited her to design a new version of the Corporation’s Arms and to illustrate Granville Bantock’s oratorio The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Tirzah’s engravings, collected and arranged in chronological order by her daughter Anne Ullmann, were published in book form by Gordon Fraser in 1987. The assembled images make an unforgettable impression of power and freshness. No telling detail escapes the gimlet, satirical eye of the youthful artist who shows complete command of the medium, using the full range of tools in one of her very first prints, March, which was one of The Four Seasons. A plain, lumpy woman in a fur trimmed coat and feather-bedecked hat with its broad brim blown back uses an umbrella as a walking stick and tugs at a Scottish terrier on a lead as she breasts a high wind and strides across a field where tossing wild daffodils are breaking into flower. The extreme cleanness of the cutting, the variation in tone achieved by means of little jabs with a small scorper and with the sensitive use of the tint tool and graver and the bold contrasts of light and dark are typical of Tirzah’s engraving and become more marked as her work progresses. March also introduces the dominant theme of Tirzah’s most personal cuts, the comfortable middle class background of her upbringing.
The short skirts, bobbed hair, pudding basin hats, flat bosoms and belts below the hips, the furniture, fittings and wallpapers of the period are celebrated with enjoyable gusto, often derisive, in these precise engravings. Some of the more memorable among them record fleeting gestures or momentary happenings which no one else would have thought of attempting in so exacting and rigorous a medium. In Yawning, which has already been mentioned and with which Tirzah must have been pleased, for she did a needlework picture of the same composition, a girl yawns and stretches as she prepares for bed; the same girl slides reluctantly from the crumpled sheets on a winter morning, feeling with her toe for a slipper; a young bather wobbling on the shoulders of an older girl standing breast high in the sea is about to lose her balance and fall into the water; the tense participants in a session of table turning and the affrighted onlookers are seen on the brink of some awful revelation.
Tirzah’s graver gleefully records the casual movements and expressions of a crocodile of Tirzah chattering schoolgirls, visual counterparts of Miss Jean Brodie’s Garwood pupils, and brings us face to face once more with the wind buffetted woman of March. Here she figures in one of the Relations series and appears at a dog show wearing jacket, tie, breeches and thick woollen socks and holds the terrier on her fat knees. Another woman stalks across the foreground of the print blowing her nose and clutching the leads of a Dalmatian and five dachshunds, two of them already beyond the edge of the engraving.
This cut is a particularly fine example of the artist’s skillful use of different tools to create the diverse textures of wool, wood, fur, leather and straw and a wide range of tone varying from white to the delicately engraved black of the foremost dog. In one or two of these engravings high spirits and humour are given a sharper edge by nightmarish fancies. They adumbrate the darker facets of the artist’s imagination which were to be more strongly expressed in some of her paintings. One of these prints shows a man starting back with alarm as he answers the telephone and hears his own voice addressing him; in another a woman who has come to feed her hens is confronted by monster fowls towering above her. Yet another vital element in Tirzah’s work is revealed by her meticulous and exquisitely composed engravings of plants, insects and wild creatures.
Her father was an enthusiastic naturalist and she shared this partiality. The acuity of Tirzah’s observation of bees and beetles, snails and spiders, fungi and flowers sets these prints apart. The love and knowledge on which they are based were later to inform her most whimsical paintings with an air of deepest conviction. Enough has been said to indicate that there is little trace of Eric Ravilious’s influence in his pupil’s work. A comparison of Tirzah’s engraving of the interior of a railway carriage, with Ravilous’s watercolour of the same subject done in 1939 (illustrated on the dust jacket of The World of Eric Ravilious, Scolar Press, 1982) and possibly inspired by his wife’s print, brings out the sharp contrast in their points of view.
The simplified compartment in the watercolour is empty; the eye goes at once to the Wiltshire landscape and the chalk cut figure of the Westbury white horse framed by the window. Tirzah’s minutely detailed engraving concentrates on the occupants of the compartment, a woman reading, a girl idly watching the changing view of trees and hills, two men asleep, one with his mouth half open, and opposite them Tirzah, lost in thought as she turns towards us. In 1930 Tirzah married Eric Ravilious. For a short time they lived in Kennington and Hammersmith; the rest of their life together was spent in Essex, first at Brick House, Great Bardfield which they shared with Edward and Charlotte Bawden, then at Bank House, Castle Hedingham and later, from 1941, at Ironbridge Farm, Shalford.
Tirzah did no more engraving after her marriage. Her first child was born in 1936 and was followed by two others. She was a devoted wife and mother and perhaps the medium of wood engraving was too exacting to combine with the domestic chores which she never found either easy or congenial. In 1933, however, she was working with her husband on murals for a circular tea room and bar at a newly built railway hotel at Morecambe. But the stylised seaside scenes animated by fireworks and fluttering flags and almost empty of figures were wholly of Eric’s devising.
Soon, however, encouraged by Charlotte Bawden, Tirzah discovered a new outlet for her talents, one that was less demanding than engraving making marbled pattern papers. She quickly mastered the volatile medium and produced patterns the like of which had never been seen, delicate repeating designs which had nothing in common with traditional marbling. The motifs are nearly always based on natural forms, on leaves, frail flowers and grasses, and the freedom and unpredictable character of the medium imbue them with a tremulous, poetic sense of life. The sensitive colour range includes pale grey, lilac, mole brown, indigo, light rust red, olive green and palest emerald and an occasional vivid touch of orange or scarlet. Rows of spear like leaves of dull grey green alternate with little blobs of the same colour circled with dots of pale red brown; large pink, shadowy leaf shapes surge upwards against a pearly luminosity; irregular spots of white like tiny flowers or flashes of light and fine dark narrow leaves move across roughly defined squares of light red pigment; discs of fiery red with dark curves above and below them, like luscious fruits and their leaves, shine between lines of tender white tassels; bold, curving petals, arranged to suggest a stylised flower, sprawl across the paper in two tones of grey; a thick mesh of vigorously upthrusting leaves is enlivened by little dabs of orange; strong branching light terracotta leaves cast green shadows; sober grey, minutely spotted discs are flanked by broken twisted cotton like filaments. Similar clusters of spiralling white threads divide large mouchette shapes outlined in red and filled with sultry, mottled green; thin, almost black leaves twist and turn against a mist coloured ground and the elegant shadows of flowering grasses lie athwart the pale, rust coloured, almost translucent forms of ragged autumn leaves. In one specially subtle design barley sugar stripes of twirling strands of white and deep grey green stand out boldly from a background of light red, white and palest dove coloured flowing and crisscrossing tendrils upon which are scattered small honeysuckle-derived flowers.
A short description of the way in which Tirzah achieved these ravishing effects will perhaps give some idea of the amazing dexterity she developed. She filled a large shallow dish, sink or portable bath with water and added a little flour to thicken it. Onto this she dropped a brush full of oil paint thinned with linseed oil and stirred the water until it became a uniform colour.
She was always ambitious, and supported by Henry’s unfailing devotion she went on working even after she became bedridden. She amazed all her friends by her determination, courage and unquenchable gaiety. She knew her illness was mortal yet declared that this was the happiest time of her life. It was certainly the most fruitful since her student days.
Tirzah’s small oils, painted very smoothly and with a fine brush, have as little in common with the work of her contemporaries as her wood engravings and marbled papers. In a few of her pictures, Boats on Cromer Beach, Canna in the Hebrides, Whither will you Wander (a delightfully particularised study of geese in an Essex field), the portrait of Peggy Angus in her sitting room at Adelaide Road the subject is rendered with the utmost fidelity to nature. The clear colour, the precision of the miniature like execution and the artist’s sharp eye for telling detail inform these little paintings with an enhanced sense of reality. The brilliant technique, smooth texture and jewel like colour of Tirzah’s work play a specially significant part in the pictures of toys among flowers or set against a distant landscape. These compositions recapture in all its freshness the relationship of an imaginative child with its dolls, trains, toy soldiers and farm animals and conjure up a magical child’s world of closely seen plants. A doll steps forward with her little muff from a thicket of bright tulips; toy trains run round a toy stable and toy horses in a landscape of spear shaped leaves and scarlet tulips; a toy soldier lies in the path of a toy steam engine watched by a maid from an upper window in a doll’s house set against a sombre river scene reflecting the mood of the painting (the last two illustrated here). The image, though more dramatic, recalls that of the dumb grenadier buried under the lawn in the familiar poem by R. L. Stevenson. He was another who never lost his childhood’s vision.
But Tirzah’s toy peopled world sometimes has another dimension. The relationship of figures and plants, of toys, human beings and the real world shifts so that we are confronted by a domain that is stranger and more disturbing than the child’s realm of dolls and toy horses amid flowers and grasses. It is only slightly alarming to see a kitten dwarfed by pansies, but when the occupants of a room in a doll’s house turn out to be portraits of the artist and her husband, Tirzah in bed, Henry in a rocking chair with the stiff horizontal legs of a Dutch doll, the humour of the idea is powerless to stifle a feeling of unease and disjointedness. And in the pictures of diminutive human beings lost in the giant growth of idyllic gardens and bosky landscapes, the altered proportions of figures and settings strongly suggest the presence of lurking danger. The tiny figure running down a path between huge, minutely painted bushes from a cottage submerged in vegetation in the brooding composition called Hide and Seek is surely engaged in more than a game. The white-suited pygmy forms of the orchid hunters of Brazil in the picture of that title tread in an impeccably painted but frightening jungle of great convolvulus leaves half as big as themselves and thick ropy creepers menaced by the monster orchids they have come to seek. The eerie painting of the moonlit encounter of a gargantuan frog and an amorphous leviathan could have seemed like part of Disneyland but in fact is charged with nightmare dread. The pallid figure of the woman in Spanish Lady standing against a threatening, owl haunted sky among tree high daffodils was inspired by a piece of pottery, but the anguished eyes are those of a living person and the relative scale of the woman and the flowers conveys an overwhelming feeling of disquiet and sadness. Tirzah’s world of green leaf and grass tassels and its surreal scale remind us of Richard Dadd’s faery, paradisial scenes. His remarkable art was little noticed until recently and it is unlikely that Tirzah saw his work. She had too much humour and gaiety ever to arrive at such furious and despairing imaginings as Dadd’s, but the kinship is there, and like Dadd she achieved in a small way some things that are astonishing and without parallel.
Written by Olive Cook. © The Whittington Press
