When the Barbican staged the grand exhibition Lee Krasner: Living Colour in 2019, the world discovered an artist who was never going to be solely ‘Jackson Pollock’s wife’ ever again. The same is now happening with artist Tirzah Garwood, through the fantastic retrospective presented by the Dulwich Picture Gallery until May 2025.

Previously best known as the wife of landscape artist Eric Ravilious and the author of Long Live Great Bardfield, Tirzah Garwood was a highly skilled artist and printmaker in her own right. This retrospective is the first to fully showcase the breadth of her work, offering both a critical reexamination and hopefully giving her the public recognition her captivating and poetic work deserve so much. A celebration of a tragic life too.

The exhibition features over eighty of Garwood’s works, including the majority of her surviving oil paintings, drawn almost entirely from private collections. This is an exceptional show. It presents an artist whose creativity thrived despite adversity in various media, from drawing to collaged constructions and wood engravings, highlighting her ‘sophisticated naïve’ style, an approach that enabled her to imbue seemingly simple or innocent subjects with deeper significance.

Following the death of Eric Ravilious in the Second World War, and the horrors of the times, Garwood adopted a deliberately naive style focusing on English gardens, landscapes and children’s toys. A series of paintings show her creative mind at play, yet mysterious and almost daunting at times. Horses and Trains (1944), and The Old Soldier (1947) for example showcase amazing brushstrokes and mastery at applying vivid colours.

The exhibition concludes with a collection of emotional works produced in Garwood’s final year, probably the apogee of art-making. Drawing inspiration from the countryside she cherished, the flowers and insects that captivated her, and the illustrated Victorian children’s books she treasured, Garwood created a series of small paintings. Both idyllic and unsettling, works such as Springtime of Flight, or Weewak’s Kitten, subtly reflect her circumstances.

A great catalogue accompanies the exhibition, featuring new research, visuals of each work on view, and essays by Ella Ravilious, Eric and Tirzah’s granddaughter, and writer Jennifer Higgie. The audio guide available via the Gallery’s Bloomberg app features narration by actress Tamsin Greig who voiced Tirzah Garwood in the 2022 film Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War. Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious is a must-see.

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Images: Tirzah Garwood,Springtime of Flight, 1950, oil on canvas,30 x 40 cm, private collection and Tirzah Garwood,Horses and Trains, 1944, oil on canvas glued to card,40.7 x 58.5cm,private collection