Joyous, curious, inventive and droll, the English artist Tirzah Garwood (1908-51) is as original as she is – so far – almost entirely unknown. If you have never seen any of her works you won’t be alone: the last show took place more than 70 years ago, after her premature death of cancer at 42. Tenderly curated by James Russell, this retrospective at Dulwich Picture Gallery is therefore effectively her first. It is a bright surprise from first to last.
Garwood’s earliest eagle-eyed woodcuts were made when she was a teenager: feathers snowing from bolsters in a bout of spring cleaning; girls in one-piece swimsuits negotiating summer waves; a woman retreating disconsolately to bed for the winter. She began The Four Seasons (1927) at Eastbourne School of Art, aged 18, tutored by Eric Ravilious, who had himself only three years experience of this hardwon medium. The artists would later marry.
Garwood’s woodcuts are incisive in every respect. They catch the ticking of a grandfather clock as a woman dozes, a gramophone horn observing her with the same alert impatience as the spaniel at her feet. They notice the sly side-eye of a card player sneaking a glance at her neighbour’s hand, and the minute difference between 10 schoolgirls marching in crocodile – round a bend, no less – from the smiler distracted by a terrier to the scrape eagerly sucking up to the form leader at the front.
Garwood laughs at her own outsize reflection in a hall of mirrors, the crisscross pattern of her woollen suit enlarged in repeat. She satirises the vogue for table-turning seances, five pairs of white hands clawing at an obliterating disc of darkness. There is a deft send-up of her own father, pointedly ignoring the window cleaner, cloth raised, who is staring at him through the glass as he pauses with pen pompously aloft, about to sign some important document. Their gestures are subtly matched to point up the class distinctions on either side of the window.
From the very start, Garwood had an extraordinary gift for texture and tone. With the finest of lines she conjures the interior of a railway carriage trundling through the English landscape, from scratchy horsehair seats to stiff leather gloves, felt cloches, fur collars and the oddly irregular sheen of pre-war silk stockings. The noses of three passengers on the left raise the eye in comical steps to the view through the window, which has its miniature echo in a tiny mirror on the wall.
Ravilious pictured a similar situation in his nearly mystical Train Landscape, but his compartment is deserted, whereas hers is teeming with human presence. A few of his works are judiciously introduced here, to show such different minds looking at similar worlds.
After her marriage, and the birth of three children, Garwood had far less time for the exacting creation of woodcuts, and her quizzical observations appear in watercolour, collage and cardboard relief. There is a beguilingly strange sense of scale – of animals and even people dwarfed by the flowers and grasses that so often appear in closeup in her foregrounds; of dolls that double as living beings in small paintings.
She made collages using leaf prints, which become tiny forests, overlaid with a stranded missionary’s hut of wood veneer, or a scout’s tent scissored out of paper. Her little daughter, Anne, kneels on a windowsill, looking for something to happen outside, one foot edging out of the collage. The world is growing smaller. In 1942, Ravilious disappeared during a wartime flight off the coast of Iceland. Garwood had her first operation for breast cancer.
And still she works, and she works, raising her children in a draughty house in Essex. She makes abstract marbled papers for the market, their watercolour delicacy nearly Japanese. She conjures the most compelling facades – a village shop, a Methodist chapel, a semi-detached house by night – boxed inside frames. Unique hybrids of mid-century watercolour and doll’s house, they resemble yet exceed the wartime Recording Britain project, in which English artists such as Graham Sutherland and John Piper made sympathetic images of vulnerable buildings and landscapes.
All the paintings – still small, but by now in oil – in the final room here made in bed, during Garwood’s final months in a nursing home. A wicked cat, a goose-stepping gander, a “prehistoric encounter”, as she called it, between a tortoise and a frog in a primeval forest of mare’s tails: her visions are as wild and spry as they are, eventually, self-reflective. Most touching of all is a portrait – self-portrait? – of a ceramic figure that belonged to the family.
Pale, long-necked, her eyes raised into the distance, the woman stands with her hands clasped beneath a starry night sky. Above her leans a pale, perhaps protective daffodil. No self-pity here, only dreams of what has been wondrous in this life; we should all be so brave when facing our end.
There is so much more to this enchanting show, perfectly suited to the graceful galleries at Dulwich. If only the same could be said of Dora Carrington (1893-1932), receiving the most admiring of attention in Chichester. Pallant House Gallery has done its utmost for her art – surreal landscapes, male and female nudes, interiors, portraits of friends and lovers – and ended up giving us more of a memoir.
Among the 100 works are too many by (and too few of) all those lovers, and would-be lovers: fellow Slade students Paul Nash, Dorothy Brett and CR Nevinson. Mark Gertler, especially, outshines Carrington at every turn. His hieratic portraits of a Spanish boy and a young servant hang right next to hers, which look like faltering pastiche.
This show undoubtedly has the best of Carrington. Her marvellously strong rear-view nude, painted as a student c.1913, is as fine as Laura Knight’s mature and more famous Self-Portrait With Nude of the same year. The Tate has loaned Carrington’s outlandish Farm at Watendlath, where the green hills huddle like bodies around the dazzling white farmhouse and washing below. The climax is her portrait of Lytton Strachey reading in bed: eyes to words, bony hands to heaven, as if he were holding a bible. She was in love with Strachey, who only loved men. Two months after his death, she shot herself.
Less context and more Carrington might just have been persuasive. Sensitively written labels want us to see her paintings as passionate, disarming, romantic, but they are too uncertain – and unfulfilled – for such words. Carrington had no ambition to show her work, which she did not sign, and my sense is that her writing, in the much-loved diaries and letters, was far stronger. The worst of this show is decor, furnishings, photographs of Bloomsbury antics, and her tinfoil mirror paintings for Fortnum & Mason; all of them fit only for Charleston.
Star ratings (out of five)
Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious ★★★★
Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury ★★
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Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious is at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, until 26 May 2025
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Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury is at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until 27 April