Three brilliant female artists - Tirzah Garwood, Suzanne Cooper and Evelyn Dunbar - whose careers were disrupted by love and war,  but whose work is finally getting its due.

Tirzah Garwood, wife of Eric Ravilious, was an English surrealist to whom Lewis Carroll would have felt akin. Before she was twenty-two she was making bold, intricate wood-engravings. When Eric died in 1942, Tirzah began making collages and oil paintings. Colourful, fantastical, and strange as Richard Dadd's fairy paintings,  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’, and a ‘rare and exciting event’. It’s a joy to celebrate her lively, strikingly original work, especially as she was my mother-in-law. 

Evelyn Dunbar was another outstanding student, described by Sir William Rothenstein as 'exceptionally gifted', whose artistic career stalled when, like Garwood, she fell in love with her teacher.  Then came the war, and she discovered new energy as  an official war-artist.  Working in the tradition of English visionaries like William Blake and Stanley Spencer, she recorded the work of the  Women's Land Army in a series of hauntingly beautiful paintings.  They languished in an attic for decades before being found, and shown to great acclaim at the Pallant House Gallery.