Private Collection

Tirzah Garwood-Ravilious (1908 - 1951)

Daren, Baker’s Shop, 1945-46

SKU: 11031

Signed,

Paper and card collage,wood and pyruma set in a box frame.

Size:
Height – 29.8cm
Width – 40.5cm

DESCRIPTION

Provenance:
The Artists Family; private collection
Presentation:
framed

Literature: Hornet & Wild Rose, The Art of Tirzah Garwood, by Anne Ullmann, The Fleece Press, 2020

As a student, Garwood had excelled as a wood engraver. During her 30’s she began painting in oils, but also produced a series of captivating images of local Essex houses and shop fronts, (1944‚Äì1949). She soon developed her own distinctive style, where each one was lovingly recorded with a mixture of print and collage which she assembled and sometimes constructed into a 3D model in a shallow box frame. 

Tirzah’s curiosity in individual shops or dwelling houses as a subject may have been stimulated when Eric Ravilious was researching material for a book of unusual shops that he planned to illustrate with lithographic plates.  High Street was published in 1938 by Noel Carrington, at that time the innovative publisher of Country Life Books. 

Tirzah appears to have been excluded from involvement in High Street, but the very fact that Eric was involved in this research is likely to have heightened her awareness of the richness of the architecture and unspoilt charm of the nearby villages.  When looking back in 1942, and writing of Great Bardfield in her autobiography, it was not the great historic houses, but the shops and shopkeepers that captivated her attention:

Great Bardfield was a Y-shaped village and one of the most attractive things about it were the shops.  The shopkeepers had wonderfully appropriate names and Mr Bone the butcher was the Happy Family Butcher in the flesh and his shop with its shutter edged edged with a little wood balustrade, was like a dolls shop. The other butcher, Mr Stokes, had a particularly lovely shop with his name written in fine square letters of ochre edged with red on a blue board. The three grocers were called Piper, Odd and Tanner and the Bakers were Geurneys and Prances.

We are indebted to Anne Ullman and Simon Lawrence for her assistance. 

Disclaimer:
Liss Llewellyn are continually seeking to improve the quality of the information on their website. We actively undertake to post new and more accurate information on our stable of artists. We openly acknowledge the use of information from other sites including Wikipedia, artbiogs.co.uk and Tate.org and other public domains. We are grateful for the use of this information and we openly invite any comments on how to improve the accuracy of what we have posted.

THE ARTIST

Tirzah Garwood-Ravilious
Tirzah
Garwood-Ravilious
1908 - 1951

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.

MORE PICTURES BY ARTIST

Tirzah Garwood-Ravilious (1908 - 1951)
The Crocodile
£1,900
Tirzah Garwood-Ravilious (1908 - 1951)
The Dog Show, 1929
£2,500
Private
Tirzah Garwood-Ravilious (1908 - 1951)
Daren, Baker’s Shop, 1945-46
Private
Tirzah Garwood-Ravilious (1908 - 1951)
Vegetable Garden, circa 1933
Private
Tirzah Garwood-Ravilious (1908 - 1951)
House at Great Bardfield, 1945
Private
Tirzah Garwood-Ravilious (1908 - 1951)
Background to Toy Train, 1950