1. Eileen Lucy "Tirzah" Garwood was a British wood-engraver, painter, paper marbler, author, and a member of the Great Bardfield Artists.
17 Facts About Tirzah Garwood
1. 2.
Tirzah Garwood's style is praised for its touches of humour and eccentricity.
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Tirzah Garwood was born in 1908 in Gillingham, Kent, the third of five children born to Ella Agnes and Frederick Scott Tirzah Garwood an officer in the Royal Engineers.
4.
Tirzah Garwood was educated at West Hill School in Eastbourne from 1920 to 1924, and then at Eastbourne School of Art from 1925, under Reeves Fawkes, Oliver Senior and, as a wood engraver, Eric Ravilious.
5.
Tirzah Garwood's father recorded the date of her first engraving, 24 November 1926, in his diary.
6.
Tirzah Garwood moved to Kensington in 1928 and later studied at the Central School of Art.
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Tirzah Garwood undertook commissions for the Kynoch Press and for the BBC, for whom she produced a new rendering of their coat-of-arms.
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In 1928 Tirzah Garwood illustrated Granville Bantock's oratorio The Pilgrim's Progress, which he wrote as a BBC commission.
9.
Tirzah Garwood married Eric Ravilious in Kensington on 5 July 1930.
10.
Tirzah Garwood created exquisite repeated designs which were used for lampshades and books.
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Tirzah Garwood was painted by Ravilious, in Two Women in a Garden, alongside Charlotte Bawden.
12.
Tirzah Garwood wrote her autobiography from March and May 1942, while recovering from the surgery.
13.
Tirzah Garwood left Ironbridge in March 1944, and moved with her children to Boydells Farm, near Wethersfield, Essex.
14.
Tirzah Garwood began painting in oils and resumed her career as an artist.
15.
Tirzah Garwood met the Anglo-Irish radio producer Henry Swanzy in 1944, and they were married in March 1946.
16.
Tirzah Garwood was again diagnosed with cancer in early 1948, and lived in a nursing home near Colchester from 1950, where she died in 1951.
17.
The last house where Tirzah Garwood lived, the eighteenth-century Grade II listed Copford Place in Copford near Colchester, was destroyed in a deliberate fire in November 2024.