Last week, Dulwich Picture Gallery opened a door into the enchanted world of Tirzah Garwood. Art circles gently buzzed in anticipation, asking, “Who is Tirzah Garwood?” A surrealist perhaps, with a small s? Did her love of Victorian and Edwardian children’s-book illustration influence her play on scale, a conviction held by the show’s curator, James Russell? Was she a proto-feminist? Some of her work looks like a moment in time from an uncanny fairy tale.
It’s not that people don’t know who she was. Tirzah Garwood has always existed on an anecdotal level. She was a talented artist who happened to be Eric Ravilious’s wife, and sometimes the subject of her renowned husband’s watercolors and prints. People have an idea of what she looked like. And there have been rare magical glimpses of her work. In 2010, an untitled small embroidery was shown at “Women of Great Bardfield,” at the Fry Art Gallery, in Saffron Walden, featuring a woman with a watering can in an idealized garden, so spellbindingly beautiful that once it has been seen it cannot be forgotten.
