‘By Christ, he could bore for Purgatory.’ So goes the first line of the poem my colleague gave our manager on National Poetry Day, many years ago. It was not, she insisted, a personal comment. The poem is ‘Mrs Aesop’, a wife’s monologue on the deficiencies of her pompous husband, from Carol Ann Duffy’s collection The World’s Wife, in which she gives a voice, usually hilarious but also relentlessly dark, to women such as Frau Freud (sick of penises), Salome (waking hungover with a severed head in her bed), Mrs Midas (furious and grief stricken at what he has done), Mrs Darwin, Myra Hindley, Eurydice, Penelope….
Duffy is of course making a serious point. It’s hardly news that women have been kept in their place for centuries, by other women as well as by men. We all know that the Mendelssohn parents stopped Fanny composing while promoting Felix, that the Brontë sisters published under male names, that the contributions of Ada Lovelace, Rosalind Franklin, Lee Miller to mathematics, the discovery of DNA, the practice of photography were overlooked in one way or another, just as we have all sat in meetings where men took credit for our ideas. We know that much of what women wrote, composed, created over the centuries was unpreserved and is lost to us forever. I should not be surprised then that, when we do get to see their work, the wives so often turn out to be more interesting than the great men who overshadowed them.
On a recent visit to ‘Watts Artists’ Village’ in the Surrey Hills, the former home of Victorian artists George and Mary Watts, I found that, while G. F. Watts painted society beauties and mythical scenes, made huge statues and developed a misguided admiration for Cecil Rhodes, his wife Mary was quietly doing her own far more original thing. Mary Fraser-Tytler, who had studied art in Dresden and London before her marriage, not only made ceramics, painted, illustrated, wrote, worked for social reform and women’s suffrage, ran her house and supported her husband. She also set up a commercial pottery using clay from the Watts’ own estate, training and employing local people. She adored her husband, who shared her ideals. And he is the one who is in the history books and major galleries.
Mary Watts’ lasting legacy is the chapel she built for the village cemetery, a fantastical mix of art nouveau, Celtic revival and her own personal style. The exterior is decorated with intricately patterned and moulded terracotta tiles, the interior is an allegorical vision created using paintings and moulded reliefs. The mouldings were made by a long-winded multilayered process using chicken wire, hatting felt and gesso, which was then painted. Most of the local villagers contributed to the decoration, including the children, who made little reliefs of locally seen plants. The place is full of wonder — intimate, magical, breathtaking.
A quite different artist, from a slightly later period, and one who was not a wife at all (although famously a mistress of Rodin) is Gwen John. In her case the great man was her brother Augustus. He was a society painter in London, she had an almost penniless existence in France. But they knew, and painted, some of the same people.
The recent exhibition and accompanying biography of Gwen John by Alicia Foster sets out to make the point that Gwen was not the eccentric recluse she has been portrayed as, but an assured member of the art world in both Paris and London. But far more interesting to me is simply seeing her paintings, currently on show at the Holburne Museum in Bath. Most of the pictures are portraits, of herself and other women. Where her brother’s portraits are stylish, colourful, stylised, Gwen’s are quieter, more serious, but alive and honest. They seem to focus on the internal life of the women she portrays. They also appear to me remarkably ahead of their time in their simplicity. There is one nude self-portrait that looks like something painted in the 1970s – or even today – rather than 1909.
Gwen and Augustus both painted her friend Dorothy (Dorelia) who became Augustus’ life partner, although he was married to Ida Nettleship and had children by both women (he is rumoured to have fathered as many as 100 children). In his many portraits of Dorelia she is posed, dressed up, self conscious. She is never making eye contact. Gwen shows her as self-assured with a direct gaze, simply dressed, self-contained, thoughtful. There is an intimacy in Gwen’s portraits of her friend that is missing from Augustus’ portrayals of his lover. He shows how she looks. Gwen’s pictures of Dorelia show who she is, or who she was in her friendship with Gwen. Seeing Gwen John’s work has been a discovery for me, and possibly for others too. At the Holburne Museum the preoccupied woman behind the desk came alive when I said how refreshing and contemporary I found her paintings, as if we were members of a secret group who shared this excitement.
But possibly my favourite among the creative women I have learned about in the last couple of years is Tirzah Garwood. I can’t remember why I started reading her autobiography, which Garwood began writing in 1942, when she believed she might die of breast cancer and wanted to leave some memories for her children. It’s a long and detailed account of her life, written chronologically, with remarkable honesty and self criticism.
Garwood is best known for being the wife of Eric Ravilious, whose watercolour landscapes have become so popular in the last few decades. But Tirzah was an artist in her own right. She met Ravilious at Eastbourne School of Art, where he was teaching and she was a student. They married five years later, by which time Garwood had become an accomplished wood engraver. Her images, mostly of everyday scenes – a school friend playing the guitar, herself in a train carriage, women spring cleaning – are full of energy and humour. At one point she describes trying to work in the living room of her parents’ home in the midst of a family argument: ‘my wood block…at that state of gestation was as precious to me as a foetus in my womb, its birth that magic moment when I should lift the Japanese paper on which it would be printed.’
Despite this love for her work, Garwood gave up engraving when she married, and had to learn to cook. She did not even know how to make a pot of tea. The couple had no money and domestic life in the 1930s was physically hard. While bringing up her family Garwood made and sold exquisite marbled paper but did no painting, drawing or engraving. Ravilious was lost in the Atlantic in September 1942, at a time when Garwood was quite unwell, and it was only at the end of her short life, in her second marriage, that she returned to figurative work, creating a series of small, magical oil paintings.
Ravilious wasn’t interested in painting people, but Garwood had a fascination with human relations and her autobiography is a candid account of the complexity and banality of life as she experienced it. Nothing is black and white. When, after four years of happy marriage, her husband fell in love with someone else, she felt ‘rather strange, but not unduly disheartened’. They both went on to have other lovers, Ravilious moving in with another woman when Garwood was pregnant with their first child. Garwood had admirably little resentment, despite some awful behaviour from Eric. The situation is best summed up by a comment from their friend Christine Nash: ‘One wouldn’t mind any amount of girlfriends, if only they didn’t make one’s husband treat one like something the cat’s brought home.’
I first saw Garwood’s engravings at an exhibition of Ravilious’ paintings a few years ago, and I found them more engaging than his style, which is pleasant enough, but does not hold the same human mystery and energy, the same warmth and liveliness. There are some similarities in their work but Ravilious observes from a distance, Garwood is up close, immersed in whatever she is depicting, its detail, humour and surprises.
Mary Watts wrote in her diary: ‘Why women fail in art is answered to myself “because of the little things in life”.’ She meant, of course, the little domestic things, the duties that men did not have. But their attention to the little things – the detail, the relationships, the brown teapot, the tiny flower – is what I love in these women’s work. I’m not so sure they failed at all. They just did it their own way. And it is one that fills me with hope.
Just as I was about to post this I noticed that the first major exhibition of Tirzah Garwood’s work is scheduled at Dulwich Picture Gallery from 19 November. You read it here first.
janebuekett 