Tirzah Garwood

Eileen Lucy "Tirzah" Garwood (11 April 1908 – 27 March 1951) was a British artist and engraver, a member of the Great Bardfield Artists. The artist Eric Ravilious was her husband from 1930 until his death in 1942. Early life Garwood was born in 1908 in Gillingham, Kent, the third of five children. Her father Frederick Scott Garwood (1872–1944) was an officer in the Royal Engineers. Her name "Tirzah" was bestowed by her siblings, a reference to Tirzah in the Book of Numbers in the Bible, and possibly a corruption of a reference by her grandmother to "Little Tertia", that is, the third child. She and her family accompanied her father on army postings to Croydon, Littlehampton and then Eastbourne. 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. She moved to Kensington in 1928. She later studied at the Central School of Art. One of Garwood's early woodcuts, shown at the Society of Wood Engravers' annual exhibition in 1927, was praised in The Times. She undertook commissions for the Kynoch Press and for the BBC, for whom she produced a new rendering of their coat-of-arms. In 1928 Garwood illustrated Granville Bantock's oratorio The Pilgrim's Progress, which he wrote as a BBC commission.