tirzah garwood

on painting women's lives, and deaths

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It takes a moment to see the other children. A casual passer-by would miss them, crouching next to the low garden walls and in the gaps between the bushes. Instead your eye is drawn to the soft sprays of blossom and the new leaves on the shrubs. It is morning, you can tell by the shadows, and still cool despite the bare legs of the little girl running through the garden; two of the five chimneys puff away in the background. The girl is Anne, Tirzah Garwood’s lone daughter and, at nine, her youngest child. Within a year she would be orphaned; her father, the war artist Eric Ravilious, had died in Iceland when she was in her infancy. Garwood made this painting from her bed at home, looking into the family garden. Her cancer had returned, she would die the following spring.