Tirzah Garwood-Ravilious
(1908 - 1951)
The Dog Show, 1929
£2,500
Private Collection
Tirzah Garwood-Ravilious (1908 - 1951)
Size:
Height – 27.2cm
Width – 26.5cm
Literature: Hornet & Wild Rose, The Art of Tirzah Garwood, by Anne Ullmann, The Fleece Press, 2020
This is one of only two surviving pieces of embroidery that Garwood produced; It shows a walled garden with beds of cabbages and marrows, and a young woman watering a row of runner beans; the hose circling the lawn snakes around her feet and sends out a fine spray of satin silk water. The embroidery is reminiscent of the work once made by sailors on long sea voyages, and as such has a very English feel; as so often in her work, Tirzah demonstrates an innovative approach to a traditional craft. Her use of modern imagery and unusual everyday subject matter, a fashionable artistic trend in the 1930’s, now giving this needlework picture a very evocative flavour of the era.
We are indebted to Anne Ullman for her assistance.
Eileen ‘Tirzah’ Garwood attended Eastbourne School of Art (1925’28), where she was taught by Eric Ravilious (1903 – 1942) whom she married in 1930.
She first exhibited in 1927, at the Redfern Gallery, and an early woodcut shown at the 1927 SWE exhibition received significant praise in The Times. Such was the originality of her printmaking that she exerted an influence over Ravilious’ own wood engravings. She was also commissioned by the BBC in 1928 to illustrate Granville Bantock’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and made whimsical but exacting observational pictures that were popular with children and exhibited by the Society for Education in Art.
While recovering from emergency mastectomy surgery in 1942 she wrote her autobiography, Long Live Great Bardfield & Love to You All (published posthumously in 2012). After Ravilious’ death that same year, Garwood remained in Essex until her remarriage in 1946. She was again diagnosed with cancer in 1948 and died in 1951. In 1952, a memorial exhibition was held at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne.
