Tirzah Garwood

Eileen Lucy "Tirzah" Garwood (11 April 1908 – 27 March 1951) was a British wood-engraver, painter, paper marbler, author, and a member of the Great Bardfield Artists.

[4] During her time with the Great Bardfield Artists, Garwood worked with Charlotte Bawden in creating exquisite marbled papers, some of which are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

[6] Curator of the Towner Gallery, Andy Friends states that Garwood's student work as a wood-engraving shows "evidence of how, in a difficult art, Tirzah almost instantly became an adept peer of her already accomplished teacher – and during 1927 began to exert an influence over his own approach.

[6] In the late 1920s, when wood engravings were widely popular, Garwood was recognized as one of the most promising, skilled, and innovative artists of that era.

[8] Between 1930 and 1932 the couple lived in Hammersmith, London, where there is a blue plaque on the wall of their house at the corner of Upper Mall and Weltje Road.

In 1931 they moved to rural Essex where they initially lodged with Edward Bawden and his wife Charlotte at Great Bardfield.

[3] During this time with the Great Bardfield Artists, Garwood was inspired by Charlotte Bawden to experiment with marbled paper.

Garwood's marbling work was known for ethereal designs and natural dream-like forms and is currently held at the Victoria and Albert museum in London.

[5] After Anne was born in April 1941, the family moved out of the often cold, and sometimes flooded, Bank House to Ironbridge Farm near Shalford, Essex.

[2] Originally intended only for her family, the autobiography, Long Live Great Bardfield & Love to You All, was published posthumously, in 2012, after being edited by her daughter Anne.

[13] Her oil paintings depict natural scenes of birds and insects that are otherworldly and enchanting in jewel-like color schemes.

[1][4] According to Robert Radford of Cassone, the International Online Magazine of Art and Art Books, "[Garwood's autobiography's] principal value is the light that it shines on the situation of a young female artist during the middle decades of the 20th century, contending with issues of self-confidence as an artist, the emerging awareness of the tyranny of society's expectations of women but also the sense that hers was a generation and a milieu from which radical transformations in behaviour could be expected.