Tirzah Garwood, wife of Eric Ravilious, was an English surrealist. Before she was 22 she was making bold, intricate wood engravings. When Eric died in 1942, Tirzah began making collages and oil paintings. Colourful, fantastical, and strange, they show toy soldiers and giant hornets, tiny houses and huge kittens. Unseen in public for decades, in 2024 they were shown to great acclaim at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

As a student at the Grosvenor School in the 1930s, Suzanne Cooper was exhibiting wood engravings and paintings in West End galleries. Then came the war. Cooper volunteered as a nurse, married, and laid aside her artistic ambitions. Her first solo show, 25 years after her death, at the Fry Art Gallery in 2018, was greeted by critics as ‘revelatory’. Our Study Day speaker, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, is Suzanne Cooper’s daughter-in-law, and takes particular pleasure in celebrating her strikingly original work.

Evelyn Dunbar was another outstanding student, whose artistic career stalled when, like Garwood, she fell in love with her teacher. She became an official war artist, working in the tradition of English visionaries William Blake and Stanley Spencer, to record the work of the Women's Land Army in a series of hauntingly beautiful paintings.