Rediscovering Evelyn Dunbar: A Life in Art (2024)

 

For your bookshelves:

Papers from a day conference held on 23 April 2023

 

Evelyn Dunbar (1906-60) remains something of an enigma. Where she is known, it is for her role as the only female artist 'salaried' by Kenneth Clark's War Artists' Advisory Committee, which aimed to record wartime scenes for posterity and occasional propaganda purposes. Dunbar particularly excelled in depicting the role of women during wartime; on farms, in nursing, or keeping the home fires burning. A recurrent focus was on women working the land, which keyed into her deep affinity with gardening, the outdoors, and landscape. In response to a growing interest in Dunbar, this volume brings together four papers from a day conference at the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History that illuminate different aspects of her life and artistic practice.

Introduction

Thomas Dobson, Peter Forsaith and Daniel Reed

Scenes from Family Life: Early Promise in the Juvenilia of Evelyn Dunbar

Peter Vass

"All that is made is the work of God": Christian Science as Creed for Evelyn Dunbar and Her Contemporaries

Jan Cox

'With very keen understanding': Evelyn Dunbar and the War Artists' Advisory Committee

Claire Brenard

Alpha and Omega: Evelyn Dunbar's Return Ticket to Oxford

Christopher Campbell-Howes

 

Published by Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History, October 2024

ISBN: 9798342662352 HB

Paperback £9.99   Hardback £14.99  Plus p&p

To order:   https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DJVXVHQZ

An English Calendar (1938)

An English Calendar 1938 72 x 72in (182 x 182cm) Photo: Richard Valencia © Christopher Campbell-Howes. Imperial College, London

Evelyn's final exposition of the month-designs she had originally made for the Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary was in An English Calendar, the largest canvas she had attempted to date. A few of the months are old friends. April - subject of a previous post - is almost unchanged. February, however, has lost her complicit furtiveness, and not to her advantage, while August has lost her previous deeply personal autobiographical elements, the symbols of her desire and its fulfilment have been confiscated and she has become merely a pretty woman sitting on a garden bench and - these things are always important in Evelyn's work - looking into the ensemble of the composition rather than outside the frame. Similarly with some of her other Gardener's Diary precursors. Evelyn originally conceived of July like this:

 July from Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary

This chap is a wonderful July, a hands-down winner in comparison with the unexceptional village-vegetable-show figure in An English Calendar. He has harvested an enormous crop of vegetables, a cornucopia so impressive in its abundance that the outsize sack - it is almost a tarpaulin, not to speak of a conjuror's cloth - is not big enough to take them all, so that he has to hold under his arm the giant cabbage he has grown. So great is the tumbling profusion of these vegetables that their weight has smashed the fence. I can imagine Evelyn hugging herself with delight at the sudden appearance of this notion at the end of her pencil, this image of Nature's outrageous generosity endorsed and expressed as something quite normal by the deadpan and incurious expression on the gardener's face.

 As for September...

September from Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary

...while Evelyn has preserved the vegetable marrows in both versions, there's no doubt in my mind as to which Mrs September, this one or the more insipid version in An English Calendar, has the greater individuality and the stronger identification with the abundance of produce at what is traditionally Harvest Festival time in the United Kingdom. But there's more to it than that...

September from An English Calendar 1938

 

Moving from right to left, we have the same tumble of vegetable marrows, surely an enormous weight to be carried from the shoulder of the woman, who has become someone quite different, someone slighter and younger, little to compare with the comfortable Mrs September of the Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary above. These pen-and-ink drawings were finished in the summer of 1937 or even earlier, in good time for them to be transferred into plates and incorporated into the embryo diary, printed and ready for sale in the closing months of 1937. Who is this younger and slighter woman? Can she be identified?

I think she can. She is Evelyn herself. Moving further leftwards, she is holding a sunflower, partly surrounded by various flowers and trailing stringy roots. The sunflower is a recent deadhead; some petals remain, but the seeds have fallen from the cortex, the dark central part of the flower head. 

 

Throughout much of their four-year association, 1933-37, Evelyn represented Charles Mahoney, her former Royal College of Art tutor and later lover, as a sunflower, partly symbolically and partly as an identifier, because they appear so frequently in his work as to have become a sort of trademark. By 1937 their relationship was beginning to come apart, accelerating as Evelyn began to demand more of him than he was prepared to give. They were two very different people. The relationship could not have lasted: Evelyn  was a devout and committed Christian Scientist from a bourgeois provincial background, Mahoney leaned far to the left, viewing, as many artists did in the 1930s, Stalin's Russia as a promised land. Evelyn had a playful, subversive, not to say impish, and frequently feminist side to her nature, subtly nuancing much of her work, which the sometimes obtuse Mahoney often found tiresome.

 

In August 1937 Evelyn discovered she was pregnant. Mahoney left her in early September. In that month or maybe a little later Evelyn miscarried. An English Calendar carries one or two other images that might be called autobiographical - August, for instance, and April - but here in September Mahoney is reduced to a faded memorial bouquet. The autumn of 1937 marked the start what Evelyn later referred to as her 'crisis years', a largely fallow period characterised by bickering with her family and during which she painted comparatively little, a directionless period marked at its nadir with working behind the counter in her sisters' haberdashery shop in Rochester High Street; crisis years from which she was rescued by her appointment in 1940 as an official war artist and, later, by her marriage to Roger Folley in 1942.

 

* * *

 

An English Calendar was exhibited at Wildenstein's Gallery, London, in the spring of 1938. It attracted favourable press notices, with the exception the Left Review of May 1938, in which a critic calling himself 'Toros' wrote:
  

Evelyn Dunbar showed invention and fancy - rare qualities in these times. But her outlook is thoroughly petit-bourgeois. There is a small-town or suburban atmosphere about it - a contented preoccupation with the little details of life among cabbages and marrows. A larger horizon and subject-matter are required to give a real chance to her very considerable powers as a designer.

'Toros' was in fact Percy Horton, a tutor at the Royal College of Art and later Master of the Ruskin School in Oxford. Evelyn worked on his staff from c.1948 until her death in 1960; they had always been good friends. There's an irony here: I wonder if Horton would have levelled the same petit-bourgeois criticism if Evelyn had not substituted the very strong images originally designed for Gardener's Diary for the much paler and more anodyne figures that ended up in An English Calendar?

An English Calendar never sold, and in 1957 Evelyn donated it to Wye College, where Roger Folley lectured in horticultural economics. For years it hung in Withersdane Hall, the administrative centre of the college, giving rise to false rumours that it was a mural. When Wye College closed down, it was recovered by the parent body, Imperial College, in whose possession it still is.


Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2017; updated 2024

Further reading...

EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING
by Christopher Campbell-Howes

is available to order online from:

Casemate Publishing | Amazon UK | Amazon US

448 pages, 301 illustrations. RRP £30

Alpha and Omega (1957)

 

Evelyn Dunbar Alpha and Omega (The Bletchley Panels) 1957 Oil on 5-plywood (2'8" x 4'3":  81 x 132cm) Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane

In late 1956 Evelyn was commissioned by the Board of Governors of Bletchley Park Training College and Dora Cohen, the Principal and an influential figure in the world of teacher training, to design and execute a mural to decorate the new college assembly hall. Evelyn had been recommended by an old friend, Percy Horton, Master of Drawing at the Ruskin School at Oxford, where Evelyn had been a Visitor since the late 1940s.

It's unlikely that Evelyn, together with practically the entire British population, had the slightest inkling of the true recent identity of Bletchley Park. From 1938 and throughout World War 2 the premises had been one of several stations of the Government Code and Cypher School. The tenth to be established of such out-of-London centres, it was known within the GCCS as Station X. In Bletchley Park, a late Victorian mansion not far from Milton Keynes, in Buckinghamshire, and its satellite buildings the colossi of cryptography and codebreaking, Alan Turing, Harry Hinsley, Gordon Welchman, Mavis Lever, Hugh Alexander and others took giant steps towards winning the war in cracking the various military codes used by the Germans, among them the famous naval Enigma.

By 1948 every vestige of what had been an extremely secret operation had vanished, leaving the main house standing in a wasteland of weeds and camouflaged huts. Some £500-worth of restitution, including the fashioning of an ornamental pond out of a circular ground-level concrete tank holding water in case of fire, was needed to turn the site into a suitable premises for a teacher training college, for which there was a pressing need immediately after the war. Bletchley Park, for female students only, was the last teacher training college to be established under the Ministry of Education's Emergency Recruitment of Teachers scheme, and maybe Evelyn refers obliquely to this in the 'Omega' of her title.

Evelyn spent the first half of 1957 preparing a selection of some five oil and water-colour sketches for the College to choose from. There are in fact ten, but some are different versions of the same idea:

  Evelyn Dunbar: Preliminary sketches 1, 3 and 9 for Bletchley Park Training College mural, 1957: Oil and water-colour on paper: Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane

Evelyn Dunbar: Preliminary sketches 2 and 4 for Bletchley Park Training College mural, 1957: Oil and water-colour on paper: Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane

Evelyn Dunbar: Preliminary sketches 5 and 7 for Bletchley Park Training College mural, 1957: Oil and water-colour on paper: Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane

One, an expanded version of 5 and 7, stands on its own:

Evelyn Dunbar: Preliminary sketch 6 for Bletchley Park Training College mural, 1957: Oil and water-colour on paper: Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane

The final two are the richest in invention:

 Evelyn Dunbar: Preliminary sketches 8 and 10 for Bletchley Park Training College mural, 1957: Oil and water-colour on paper: Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane

(Dimensions: Nos. 1 - 4: c10" x 17": c.26 x 43cm. Nos. 5 - 10: c.8" x 12": c.19.5 x 29cm)

After Evelyn's death in May 1960 Roger had Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 4 framed. They were shown at a London exhibition mounted the following October by the Society of Mural Painters, of which Evelyn had been a member since 1944. In due course the eventual owner, Oxford Brookes University, acquired the complete set.

Because Evelyn's finished product turned out to be a linked pair of panels, it's sometimes assumed that the original mural commission was for two paired images. It's difficult to make a convincing complementary pairing of any of these sketches. Each design, in its various versions, stands on its own. I don't think Evelyn, at this stage, had any intention of creating a pair of images which would reflect the purpose of Bletchley Park Training College. Presumably a set of four, possibly five, I suspect Nos. 1, 4, 5 (with an alternative in 6) and 10, were submitted. One was chosen to decorate the new college hall. Unfortunately we will never know which one.

(My private idea is that Evelyn would have preferred No. 10. The design is extremely bold and the symbolism is inventive and arresting. There's a compelling left-right travel to it, typical of Evelyn. The trunk of a knotted or pollarded willow tree, symbol of wisdom, has fallen. It's rotten, no more than a husk, and the wisdom it once contained has disappeared, no matter how minutely the children explore it, sitting on it, lying on it, clambering over it, peering through where an empty branch of wisdom might have been. Two slightly older figures, both apparently girls, on the right are indicating that what the children are looking for lies out of the frame, to the right. In No.8, the red-coated girl is pulling her companion in that direction, in No.10 she is pointing. There is some new building going on in the left background, as there is in many of these sketches, maybe reflecting the building going on at Bletchley Park, maybe symbolising the personal building that learning brings with it. What a mural this would have made!)

Now we start to unravel a fascinating tangle. Curiously, I was more closely involved, although marginally, with Evelyn's Bletchley Park work than with anything else she painted. (I don't count sitting for my portrait.) In July or August 1957, when I was 15, Evelyn invited me to accompany her to Bletchley for a week, to help her mix her paints, as she put it, and possibly for company as well: at that time Roger was on the other side of the Atlantic, serving on a UK Government Commission into the citrus industry in the Windward Islands, a commitment that lasted several months. We drove to Bletchley in their half-timbered estate car, which devotees of Morris Oxfords of the period will remember with affection.

In middle of the long summer vacation the College was deserted. We had the place to ourselves. Evelyn showed me the scope of her project: a new assembly hall had recently been built, or integrated into existing premises. It was to be decorated with a large mural. There was no mention of Alpha and Omega. Evelyn's task that week was to cover the selected wall area, as far as I remember facing an extensive window area, with glue size, and then, when the size was dry, to start the preliminary squaring up and sketching in of the principal elements. Evelyn encouraged me to help with the sizing, and I remember working on trestles, which we gradually lowered as we worked down the wall, happily slapping on the size with a large wallpaper brush, maybe 9" wide.

Once the job was finished there was time to kill while the size dried. I remember going into Oxford, some 50 miles away, of which my chief memories are going to tea at the Randolph Hotel and visiting Worcester College to see Evelyn's Summer Eights.

There's no doubt in my mind that the original Bletchley project was  comparable in size to The Country Girl and the Pail of Milk, the mural which she contributed to the Brockley murals twenty years and more before. Evelyn had made several visits to Bletchley before our week there, and would return the following week to start painting in earnest, although I would not be with her. The deadline for completion was November 29th, 1957, when Princess Alexandra of Kent was due to open the new hall.

Open it Princess Alexandra did, and although Evelyn was present there was no mural to grace the scene. What had happened? 

Evelyn was 50 and probably already affected by the hardening of the arteries that caused her death three years later, although her Christian Science would not allow her to recognise this imperfection. However enthusiastic she might have been at the start of the project, I think she later recoiled from the prospect of several weeks' travel between Wye and Bletchley, or several weeks - months, even - staying with friends in Oxford. Her summers were also the occasion for the courses and summer schools she gave at The Elms, a much more convenient and less solitary way of earning for a middle-aged woman than clambering about on trestles and scaffolds. Although not yet officially opened, the hall was already in use, meaning that Evelyn's painting time was limited to the summer vacation. I think many things conspired to drive Evelyn to abandon the project, or at least to look for a compromise. It's possible that Evelyn found her own designs too banal to be of lasting interest, maybe with the exception of 8/10, which might have been too bold to please the commissioning body.

I don't know what factors may have led to delaying the start of the mural, but as 1957 advanced it all became a terrible and nail-biting scramble. The lease on The Elms expired at the year's end. With Roger away in the Caribbean, it fell to Evelyn alone to house-hunt. With misgivings Roger, now returned from the Caribbean, and Evelyn moved in November into what they called Tan House, an uninteresting house in Wye with no studio. 'It was our one mistake', Roger wrote in Evelyn Dunbar: The Husband's Narrative, a pamphlet he produced for private circulation in the wake of Gill Clarke's 2006 biography of Evelyn: 'Strangely, we did not flourish there.' They stayed there for less than a year.

There was another factor, and a new interest. A mile or two from The Elms, at a place called Mersham le Hatch, was the Caldecott Community, a children's home founded by a remarkable woman called Leila Rendel. She named her children's home, which she had founded in the East End of London in 1911 and which had been housed in various places before finally coming to rest in East Kent, after Randolph Caldecott, a late Victorian illustrator of children's and other books. Her guiding principles for the nurturing and raising of children centred on the notions of healthy minds in healthy bodies and above all consistency and stability in a caring and ordered environment.

Leila Rendel encouraged neighbours who might have something interesting or stimulating to offer to adopt - not in any formal sense - children from the Caldecott Community. In 1957 she approached Evelyn, who responded, as might be expected, very positively (Roger was less interested: his work took him for longer and longer periods abroad), and subsequently boys from Caldecott came to The Elms to stay for odd weekends and sometimes for longer, especially during school holidays. With Evelyn's particular magic with lively and intelligent 10- and 11-year-olds it worked extremely well. Only two boys were 'adopted' by Evelyn over the remaining three years of her life, and one of these was a lad called Barry Paterson. (As witness to the deep impression Evelyn made on Barry Paterson, he has remained a member of the little world of Dunbarians ever since. Another Caldecott Community protégé, a contemporary of Barry Paterson, continues to hold a bright candle for Evelyn.)

Barry's arrival coincided with a general re-think of Evelyn's Bletchley Park Training College commitment. The mural and any contract accompanying it was scrapped, and after discussion with Dora Cohen and the Governors, it was decided that Evelyn would paint two panels, not for the hall but for the College library, where there were spaces above the two doors.

The design for the library panels was to be based on the College's emblem. This emblem consisted of a small hunting horn, originally the property of the first Vice-Principal (who also ran the library), folded in on itself to resemble something like a lower-case alpha, the first letter of the Greek alphabet, α. The horn, occasionally used in some form of College student ritual or ceremony, in its 'alpha' shape was enclosed inside the last Greek alphabet letter, the womb-like upper-case omega, Ω. The motto of the College amplified the first-and-last meaning of the emblem, In my end is my beginning.

This motto has a direct association with a line in Revelation 22:13, almost at the very end of the Bible: I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. It tallies neatly with Evelyn's convictions, derived to a large extent from Genesis, the first book of the Bible, of the relationship between the Creator's promise to mankind of an endlessly abundant earth in return for mankind's undertaking to cherish it, and the cyclical nature of the seasons, seedtime and harvest, life and apparent death. (I write 'apparent' because in a cherished nature nothing dies: in any living thing the seeds of rebirth are present.)

A year earlier, in September 1956, Lt. Col. Noel Byam Grounds, the vice-chairman of  the College Board of Governors, had died. In due course the vice-chairman's widow, Anna Byam Grounds, donated £200 (nearly £6,000 at 2024 values) in memory of her husband's attachment to and work for the College. The governors put this sum towards Evelyn's fees, specifically for painting the two library panels. It would have been a reasonable fee for the panels, but a mediocre sum for the initially proposed mural.

Evelyn was given a free hand with the design, always within the Alpha and Omega concept of the College emblem. An earlier version of Alpha, made before Barry's involvement, shows a more prominent alpha-shape -

Evelyn Dunbar: Sketch for Alpha: Crayon and colour wash on paper: Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane

- but has no suggestion of the trumpet-blowing boy leading his fellows towards better things away from the primeval sea and the foreshore.

Evelyn Dunbar Alpha 1957 Oil on 5-plywood (2' 8" x 4'3": 81 x 132cm) Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane

We can imagine Evelyn starting Alpha in late August or early September 1957. As the now abandoned mural would not feature in the November 29th opening ceremony of the new College hall, there was no particular deadline for finishing the panels. Nevertheless Evelyn intended to complete them in time and have them on display.

Providentially Barry Paterson arrived in time to spur Evelyn's imagination and to model for Alpha. On the edge of the wider consciousness and awarenesses that come with adolescence, he has come furthest inland from the sea, origin of all life, leaving other children (although some look more adult) absorbed in activities of purposeless innocence on the beach. Alpha, with a staff to help him through the lush and untamed vegetation, is looking out of the frame, and we can't see the terrain he is about to enter, only that he's at the start of his exploration. He's carrying something instantly recognisable to the students - and staff - of Bletchley Park Training College: the little hunting horn belonging to Miss Hodgson, the Vice-Principal, with which Evelyn had maybe taken a little licence to form into the 'Alpha' shape mentioned earlier.

When Alpha has found what he's looking for, will he sound his horn, and will the companions he has left on the beach follow him? Will they abandon the extraordinary childish and uninformed, indeed futile, pastimes Evelyn has given them, shrimping in the air, trying to fly a kite by means of a horse, while someone unhelpfully clutches at the string? Having no wider outlook than one's own reflection in the central pond? (This is maybe a reference to the ornamental pond at Bletchley.)

 Evelyn Dunbar Omega 1957 Oil on 5-plywood (2' 8" x 4'3": 81 x 132cm) Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane

The second panel, Omega, is less subtle. Alpha's staff, transformed into a stake to hold up the dahlias and black-eyed susans, appears on the right of the painting, so presumably he has found what he was looking for. 'Omega' is represented by a large hoop up which a climbing plant or fruit tree that I can't identify has been trained, tended by a gardener. The ladder has no top to it (we shall see another such ladder in Evelyn's final painting, Jacob's Dream of 1960): so there is no upward limit to mankind's aspirations. Within the ambit of the omega is a family of four sitting or standing on a garden seat, and I wonder if Evelyn has fast-forwarded Barry Paterson into fatherhood and the achievement of the enlightenment and wisdom relayed and transmitted to him by the four other figures, students of education soon to be teachers, who take up the left hand side.

Marcella Allender, wife of a local farm manager and close friend of Evelyn, modelled for the serious-minded figure on the left. The blues of her cardigan and skirt, and whatever she's reading (it's not a book: could it be a sketch pad or a music score?) match exactly the colours Alpha is wearing in the earlier panel, one of the several unities between the two. A redheaded student wearing the College blazer is waiting outside what Bletchley Park students would have recognised as the Principal's office. They would also have recognised the ornamental pond in the middle ground, as well as the (then) modern buildings behind the family, a legacy from Bletchley Park's wartime days.

The panels were still unfinished by November 29th, but all the same Evelyn took them to the official hall opening to give them further touches in situ. They were still not finished by the following February, when Dora Cohen, the Principal, mentioned them in her annual report, quoted in Gill Clarke's Evelyn Dunbar: War and Country:

    Although essentially completed Miss Dunbar, may we understand, still do some work on them for some time to come. She has spoken to the students of the evolution of her ideas and we have been fascinated by it. Very concisely, Alpha is represented by things untrained: vegetation, the sea, primitive sports and movements, an unclothed boy without family conventions. The dawn is coming up and the boy is turning his head away from the shadow to the lightening day. Omega gives cultivated flowers and a fruit-tree trained to the shape of Omega. There is a family, landscape, civilized girls and reading.
    [...]
    After the first impact of unexpectedness most of us can truly say that the more we live with them the more we like them and even love them. There is no doubt whatever that the College has now a rare possession in trust.

In the same report Dora Cohen records that Evelyn was working as a temporary part-time lecturer at Bletchley Park, teaching there one day per week.

  * * *

There are some rich and rare things in Alpha and Omega, and sometimes the viewer can overlook subtleties that would have had a compelling impact on the people for whom the panels were specifically designed. In 1969 Bletchley Park Training College was absorbed into Lady Spencer-Churchill College of Education, Oxford, which in turn became part of Oxford Brookes University in 1992. Alpha and Omega (and their preparatory sketchwork) are now housed in the University's Special Collections at Gipsy Lane. In a sense these panels are the only relics of the teacher training college Evelyn did her best to crystallise in very difficult circumstances.

(Original text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2013 and 2024. All right reserved.)

Further reading...

EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING
by Christopher Campbell-Howes

is available to order online from:

Casemate Publishing | Amazon UK | Amazon US

448 pages, 301 illustrations. RRP £30