Tirzah Garwood

Eileen Lucy "Tirzah" Garwood (11 April 1908–27 March 1951) was a British artist and engraver, considered a member of the Great Bardfield Artists. She was the wife of the artist Eric Ravilious from 1930 until his death in 1942.

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 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.

She 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 's oratorio The Pilgrim's Progress, which he wrote as a BBC commission.

Garwood married Eric Ravilious in Kensington in July 1930. 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. In 1933 they painted murals at the Midland Hotel in Morecambe.

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