Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious
Exhibition Dulwich Picture Gallery
Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious
Exhibition Dulwich Picture Gallery
In the last 50 years, many women artists have attained a recognition that largely evaded them during their lives - Artemesia Gentileschi, the 17 Century Italian Baroque painter, whose powerful work received a much overdue retrospective at the National Gallery four years ago was one. The Making Modernism Exhibition at the Royal Academy between 2022 and 2023 highlighted four women artists painting in Germany in the early 20th Century: the social and domestic scenes depicted by Kathe Kolkwitz, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin made this one of the exhibitions that gave me most pleasure at the time.
Other women artists remained in the shade of their more famous husbands - Sonia Delaunay, wife of fellow abstract and co-founder of the art movement Orphism, for example. Lee Krasner (wife of Jackson Pollock), Gwen Knight (wife of Jacob Lawrence), Elizabeth Siddall (wife and model of Dante Gabriel Rossetti), Elaine de Kooning (wife of Willem de Kooning), Jo Hopper (married to Edward Hopper), and Elizabeth Catlett (married to Charles White) were others. Gabriel Munter appears in this list too.
Now, Dulwich Picture Gallery has mounted a retrospective of the work of Tirzah Garwood (1908 - 1951), wife of 20C British artist Eric Ravilious. At home with various techniques - wood engraving, paper ‘marbling’ (on which more later), collage maker, drawing, and painting in oils and watercolours, Garwood remained productive throughout her life, even describing her final year as her happiest, simply because of being able to continue making art through her terminal illness.