Toy Trains and Crocodiles

We went along to Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious at Dulwich Picture Gallery expecting to gain most enjoyment from the artist's witty, whimsical early woodcuts and drawings. In fact, rather to our surprise, it was her late paintings and 3-D collages that stole the show: strange, sometimes childlike, sometimes quite sophisticated art, with a touch of the surreal and a great deal of fantasy. And often very joyful, when you consider how the last decade of Garwood's short life was marked by war, death and fatal illness. 

That's the decade beyond Ravilious; her first husband, Eric, died in a plane crash while working as a war artist in 1942. It's only in recent years that Tirzah's own art has started to draw attention; we first came across her in a small show at the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden back in 2019. This exhibition in south-east London is a much bigger, more comprehensive affair. And one that's been drawing crowds; we arrived at 1200 on a Tuesday and can't remember a busier exhibition at this venue. 

Our first image comes from the final room of the show, full of pictures Garwood created while in a nursing home in Essex during the last year of her life with terminal cancer in 1950-51. Although she was in severe pain, Garwood described these final months as the happiest year of her life, and she carried on painting, making art that was oddly vibrant and exuberant and, for want of a better description, just a bit eccentric. 

This is Springtime of Flight. If you're the viewer, you're right down at ground level, with a worm's-eye view of these flowers that seem to have been uprooted from a Dutch still life or an Albrecht Dürer nature study. There's a butterfly that's apparently taken off in pursuit of that anachronistic biplane from four decades earlier, soaring into a cloudy sky. We learn from the wall caption that friends had brought Garwood a box of spring flowers and that she seems to have melded these with the memory recorded in her autobiography of "one of those lovely early flying machines" she'd seen as a child. 

Another, more surrealistic, work sees us again down at ground level, witnesses to a Prehistoric Encounter. By the light of the moon, a tortoise and frog appear to have surprised each other as they emerge into a clearing by the pond in some strange forest of ferns populated by ladybirds and a dragonfly.

What does it mean? Who knows, but it's not the sort of work you might expect an artist facing death to be producing. It's so full of life. 

And you can see the connections between these late paintings and Garwood's graphic works, which appear early on in the show. They too are playful, lively, packed with observation and humour. These wood engravings are the works that define the first phase of Garwood's stop-start career before she married Ravilious, her teacher, in 1930 and had three children.

Never Smile at a Crocodile is the title of the song, but we beg to differ. 

We can't help grinning in front of The Crocodile, Garwood's 1929 engraving, one of 12 commissioned for a calendar that never got produced. It demonstrates how she was able to create a sense of perspective as the crocodile of schoolgirls comes round the circular wall, while emphasising a delightful range of patterns and textures -- the bricks, the paving stones, the bark of the bare trees, the uniforms -- all squeezed into a small print. 

There are many more textures and surfaces, more light and shadow inside and outside the carriage window in The Train Journey.  Look at the varied fabrics and shades of the clothes and hats, not to mention the hair -- or lack of it -- and the moustache. Nothing is stinted on the depiction of the interior: the wire luggage racks above the heads, the seat coverings, and the wood panelling; even the glass of the windows seems tangible thanks to their chunky frames. And in the distance is the countryside, in such detail you can imagine the old farming methods.

That's Garwood herself facing us in the compartment, by the way. 

We'd seen quite a few of these early works previously, but we love their gentle unfading humour. Some, though, we hadn't encountered before, such as this delightful Window Cleaner. 

Not only has that window cleaner read every word of the letter the rather self-satisfied gent is writing, he's probably already worked out what the next sentences are. As George Formby was to sing: "Now I go cleaning windows to earn an honest bob/For a nosy parker it's an interesting job."

After their marriage, Eric and Tirzah moved to Great Bardfield in Essex with their friends Charlotte and Edward Bawden. Garwood juggled being a full-time mother with being a part-time artist, creating a profitable sideline in marbled papers. There are a number of Ravilious pictures from this period in the show as well, including Two Women Sitting in a Garden, depicting Charlotte reading and Tirzah shelling peas -- an image instantly conjured up for us by any prospect of fresh peas for dinner. 

Garwood took up oil painting in the middle of World War II, a couple of years after Ravilious's death. Some of this work strikes a note of incongruity, unreality, naivety, such as The Cock, with an out-of-scale farmyard bird dominating a landscape. Similarly conceived is Etna, depicting not the volcano but a toy train named after it, and the rather less lava-strewn slopes of Mount Caburn in East Sussex.

Another medium Garwood began to explore was that of collages, capturing village scenes using paper and wood in box frames. They're quite fun, but you'll forgive us if we haven't included any, because they don't photograph particularly well. So you'll need to go along to see them, particularly Papermills, with a built-in mechanism to allow the river and its waterfowl to flow under the bridge and past the building. 

But we'll end up back at the late paintings, where Erskine the cat is returning at dawn after a night out on the tiles. 

What's he been up to? Whatever it is, he looks like he's been enjoying himself. 

Practicalities

Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious is on at Dulwich Picture Gallery in south-east London until May 26. It's open from 1000 to 1700 Tuesdays to Sundays, as well as Bank Holiday Mondays, and standard tickets cost £20 including a Gift Aid donation. To be sure of getting in when you want to, you can book online here. Allow 60-75 minutes. Tickets also cover entry to the gallery's permanent collection, which includes a number of Rembrandts. 

The gallery is about 10 minutes walk from both West Dulwich station, for trains from Victoria, and North Dulwich, for trains from London Bridge.

Images

Tirzah Garwood (1908-1951), Springtime of Flight, 1950, Private collection
Tirzah Garwood, Prehistoric Encounter, 1950, Private collection
Tirzah Garwood, The Crocodile, 1929, Private collection
Tirzah Garwood, The Train Journey, 1929, Private collection
Tirzah Garwood, Window Cleaner, 1927, Private collection
Tirzah Garwood, Etna, 1944, Private collection
Tirzah Garwood, Erskine Returning at Dawn, 1950, Private collection