Dorset (1946-47)

Evelyn Dunbar Dorset 1947-8 (1' 7" x 1' 11": 48 x 58cm) Photograph Ben Taylor ©The present owner. Private collection

Writing towards the end of his life in his unpublished 2007 pamphlet Evelyn Dunbar: The Husband's Narrative, Evelyn's husband Roger Folley states: 'My sister offered us the use of a vacant cottage adjoining her house at Long Compton. With more pull than push, we leaped at the chance. The Dunbars gave us some furniture, and we moved there, [..] our married life began. Evelyn had her first experience of housekeeping, but her painting was handicapped. The cottage had few rooms, low ceilings and low windows. Nevertheless she made her first portrait and [..] Dorset was sold to a patron.'

The patron was Mary Landale, a student at the Ruskin School of Drawing and of Fine Art in Oxford, where Evelyn taught part-time as a Visitor. In March 1951 Mary Landale's niece, then 15, wrote to her parents from her aunt's house -

Auntie Maydie [the family name for Mary Landale] has bought a picture by a well known artist. It is an allegorical figure of a woman symbolising Dorset (I think it is Dorset) sitting in a background of (presumably) Dorset countryside. It is a lovely picture, very graceful & done in a colour scheme [of] dullish greens.

- which if nothing else suggests that its purchaser bought it for its own sake and not out of any great familiarity with or special fondness for the county of Dorset. Nor is it certain that Evelyn ever went there, apart from one occasion in the mid-1930s when she spent a few days near Wimborne child-minding for some friends. Why did she paint it?

Dorset was lent back by Mary Landale for showing in Evelyn's only solo exhibition, at Wye College, Kent in 1953. I went to this exhibition. Rising 12, I was very much struck by this image, I think falling in love a little with this lovely but slightly troubled woman, unique in Evelyn's work, but apprehensive of raising with her the boyish conundrum that if you asked Dorset to stand up she would be so monstrously tall that the breeze evident in the painting would blow her over. But who was she?

A year or two later, in the course of a conversation about what I was doing at school, I told Evelyn that in English we were reading Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd. She was pleased. For her, Hardy was an important writer, the most elemental of English novelists and one she often mentioned. She told me his The Trumpet Major lay behind Dorset. After a teenage failure to persevere with it, I didn't read The Trumpet Major fully until very much later, many years after Evelyn's death in 1960. There was a sudden, eye-blinking epiphany: Evelyn's hint from so many years before was very loaded indeed. She had done the same with Dorset as she had with so many of the Brockley mural spandrels, where the image shifts from mere decoration to something much more lively and meaningful once the viewer penetrates to the underlying narrative, which may be obscure, not to say hermetic. But why The Trumpet Major? Clearly Dorset - the woman - is a personification: if for Evelyn the spirit of Dorset - the county - was best expressed by Hardy, the choice of suitable Hardy heroines on which to base such a personification is not wide. Tess Durbeyfield? Bathsheba Everdene? Susan Henchard? Hardy is not kind to his women. There is one exception: Evelyn's choice of Anne Garland in The Trumpet Major becomes clearer.
 
Towards the end of The Trumpet Major Anne Garland trudges from Weymouth to a high point towards the extremity of Portland Bill, which she reaches at about midday. From here there are wide views of the English Channel. Anne Garland settles herself and gazes out to sea. Presently what she has climbed the hill to see comes into sight to the south-east: HMS Victory, outward bound on the voyage that will culminate in Trafalgar. On board HMS Victory is one of Anne Garland's suitors, Bob Loveday, whom she eventually marries.
 
Hardy is quite specific about the season ('...at this time of mist and level sunlight...') and the weather ('...the wind is to the south-west...'). HMS Victory passes her and begins to disappear, and as the topmost masthead disappears over the south-western horizon she murmurs to herself a line from Psalm 107: 'They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters…' In a typical Hardy coup de théâtre, someone who has come up behind her unnoticed carries on: 'These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.' The voice is that of Bob's brother John Loveday, the trumpet major of the title. (In fact, according to the ship's log, HMS Victory passed Portland Bill in the early afternoon of 16th September 1805.) Dorset herself is looking out of the frame, to the south-west, the direction from which a watery sun is shining and from which the wind is blowing her hair back, billowing out her robe like a man-o'-war's sail behind her left shoulder. Resting her forearms on her upraised knees, she is holding her fingertips together in an attitude of deep thought, of prayer, and forming her hands and fingers into a symbolic roof of protection. What is she concentrating her worried gaze on? What is she seeing that we cannot see, and whom is she protecting, framed between her fingers and thumbs, at an angle a little below the horizontal, gradually receding from her view and eventually dipping below the horizon, far out to sea? And of course Bob Loveday, unlike his Admiral, survives Trafalgar and eventually comes home safe, and England is saved from the threat of invasion by Napoleon's armies. Whatever echoes of The Trumpet Major there may have been, Dorset stands for protection, emphasised in her figure, in her watchful pose and in the form of her hands.

(Original text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2019. All rights 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

 

Christmas 1945

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1945 Pre-publication presentation (?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection

Evelyn's vignette of her and her husband Roger's first married home featured on their 1945 Christmas card. 'Our first house' is added in Evelyn's handwriting at the foot. Exceptionally, there is no literary contribution from Roger.

This drawing - it will enlarge if you click on it - is particularly fascinating for me, because at the time, as a very small child, I lived with my mother at The Old Orchard next door, the slightly higher house to the right of Evelyn's drawing. Although its official address was No. 8, Long Compton, Evelyn and Roger called their thatched cottage Vyner's, after a previous owner. 

Evelyn had a rather unsatisfactory studio in an outbuilding, and, love sheds though she did, I'm sure that she missed her old studio in The Cedars, the Dunbar family home in Rochester. There's a glimpse of this studio in Winter Garden: the house, seen faintly to the right of the painting between the trees, has a modest tower with a pyramidical roof. The upper room of this tower, well provided with windows, gave a generous light, especially the north light so favoured by artists, with which a tumbledown rural Warwickshire shed could hardly compete.

 Evelyn Dunbar Winter Garden ?1928-1937 (1' x 3': 30 x 91cm) Tate Britain

All the same Evelyn completed some major paintings during her 15 months or so in Long Compton. One was Dorset. Another was Mercatora, whose location, ironically for a painting about navigation, is unknown. This painting took its name from Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594), the Flemish map-maker whom everyone knows of, even if unwittingly, because he developed a method of representing a three-dimensional sphere as a two-dimensional rectangle. The rectangular map of the world that we are all familiar with is due to Mercator's Projection. According to Roger, by December 1945 an ex-RAF navigator, Mercatora was an allegorical figure representing aspects of navigation. If this short commentary turned out to be instrumental in finding Mercatora, it would be wonderful.

Equally tantalising is the disappearance of another painting from this period, Cottages at Long Compton, which Evelyn exhibited in Oxford in the winter of 1949 and sold for 20 guineas (£21). Was Evelyn's Christmas card drawing accurate? There's no reason why it shouldn't have been, but it was fascinating to come across, while searching the internet for any clue relating to Evelyn's lost painting Cottages at Long Compton, a startling - and much more recent - photograph of the very thatched cottages in Evelyn's drawing.

 Thatched cottages at Long Compton © Stephen Mole Photography

Many thanks to Stephen Mole (whose photographs are much sharper and more splendid than the above reproduction, which seems to have gone through the Blogger mangle, might suggest), of Stephen Mole Photography, for his help in the preparation of this commentary.

(Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2012. All rights reserved.)

 

Further reading...

EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING by Christopher Campbell-Howes
is available to order online from
http://www.orders@scriptps.co.uk
448 pages, 300 illustrations. £25

Christmas 1944

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1944 Pre-publication presentation (?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection

Evelyn's husband Roger Folley, serving with 488 (N.Z.) Squadron based at Amiens-Glisy in northern France, is the subject of their Christmas card for 1944. Roger managed to obtain a few days' leave at Christmas time, which he spent with Evelyn at The Cedars, the Dunbar family home in Rochester.

Evelyn has drawn Roger in his flying kit, leather helmet with earphones, night-vision goggles, oxygen mask and very non-uniform cravat. She has signed her drawing E.F. on Roger's right shoulder, and beneath she has written 'From a drawing of Roger on leave from France'. (It should enlarge if you click on it.)

For the first time in their series of Christmas cards Roger has added his own poem:

Wrong was strong for Right to fight-
The struggle's on, it is not won.
Many are freed; they're still in need.
Our counterparts have thankful hearts.
We, their saviours, know what prayer does,
And intercede against self-heed.

During Roger's Christmas leave his pilot, Wing Commander Ron Watts, Commanding Officer of the squadron, had rostered himself for duty and had invited another navigator to take the seat beside him in his De Havilland Mosquito night-fighter. This team brought down a Luftwaffe Junkers 188 in the early hours of Christmas Eve, and I have sometimes wondered what Roger felt about having missed out on what his colleagues would have called a 'kill'.

Roger Folley would have been 100 on the day this was posted, 6th December 2012.

(Original text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2012. All rights reserved.)

 

Further reading...

EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING by Christopher Campbell-Howes
is available to order online from
http://www.casematepublishing.co.uk/index.php/evelyn-dunbar-10523.html
448 pages, 300 illustrations. £25

A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling (1944)

  A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling 1944 (3' x 4': 91 x 121cm) Manchester City Art Gallery

A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling is almost the last of Evelyn's Women's Land Army paintings, and almost the last of her wartime canvases. The preliminary sketches were made at East Malling Research Station, not far from Maidstone, in December 1944. At the time her husband Roger Folley was serving with his RAF unit, 488 (N.Z.) Squadron based in Amiens, in northern France, supporting the Allies' advance towards Germany. Home leave was rare, dependent on spare seats on returning transport aircraft, but Roger managed to spend a short Christmas leave with Evelyn at the Dunbar family home in Rochester. Heartened and encouraged by Roger's presence, for this painting Evelyn returned, I suspect with great pleasure, to her beloved Kent landscape.

The East Malling Research Station of the Kent Incorporated Society for Promoting Experiments in Horticulture, to give it its full original title, was founded in the 1920s. Evelyn spent some time there in the winter of 1944/5, when one of the principal activities was pruning of fruit trees, particularly of apple trees. Until more disease-resistant rootstocks were introduced from the United States and latterly from Poland, the influence of East Malling Research Station on the British commercial apple industry was vast. Most commercial apple orchards used, and often still use, Malling series rootstocks, identifiable from the letter M in their reference numbers.

Evelyn's entrée to East Malling Research Station may have owed something to the horticultural economist Glynn Burton, a good friend of Roger since their student days at Leeds University. We may have met him before: he was one of the four 'mice' featured in An Episode in the History of the Lake District. Glynn Burton had strong associations with East Malling, where he later made his name as an authority on potato cultivation.

Evelyn was excited by this painting, and I think her excitement shows in the size of the canvas, the originality of the design, the care taken in its execution, the exceptionally sensitive colouring, in the inferences she draws and - I think - the little final joke she leaves the viewer with. It's a magnificent canvas that deserves close study.

Technically, we could consider it as an unusual historical document, because the thrust of some areas of research undertaken by East Malling was to develop cultivars for heavy-fruiting apple trees with limited upward growth, thus making them easier and cheaper to harvest. The trees in Evelyn's painting are much taller than commercial apple trees today. So these aren't any old apple trees, as one might say: they are some of the highest quality trees in contemporary Britain, the result of painstaking research, expertise and practical husbandry in selection, grafting and nurture.

Evelyn's squad of Land Girls, a mix of volunteers and conscripts possibly a dozen strong and maybe more disappearing into the far distance, are well wrapped against the cold of a Kentish December. A line of low hills - in fact the North Downs - defines the horizon. The sky is overcast and wintry. This may be Evelyn's only Women's Land Army painting in which gloves are being worn. Once again - disregarding the frame for the moment - we're led into the picture from the left, partly by the angle of the stepladder legs, and I wonder if Evelyn is deliberately drawing our attention to the extraordinary risks these young women are taking with such confidence.

The extreme right-hand figure, in apple-yellow coat, is standing very near the top of her step-ladder - you can see the white top platform to her lower left - and two others are pruning the upper branches of the nearest right-hand tree. Their acrobatics are nothing compared to another figure, to which - surely deliberately- various geometrical lines lead our eyes, in the third or fourth tree on the right: she's teetering precariously on the stepladder platform, at full stretch to reach the topmost branches. I can feel a slight vertigo just looking at her.

Maybe the Land Girl on the extreme left has no head for heights and has been excused climbing the stepladders, even though the rungs are covered with a non-slip material, or possibly wound round with rope. As evidence of the cold, she has her left hand in her coat pocket. The two aproned Land Girls beyond her, collecting pruned branches and twigs in a tarpaulin, may be looking forward to some extra warmth before so very long, maybe after nightfall, because the short midwinter hours of daylight must be put to good purpose: you can't prune in the dark, but you can make a bonfire of your prunings. In due course the wood ash, rich in potassium and trace elements, will be mixed with other nutrients and dug as required into the 360 acres of the East Malling Research Station. All very good husbandry. Waste not, want not, especially in wartime.

The avenue of apple trees stretches away to a vanishing point. Again, as in Singling Turnips and Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook, there are no limits to this plantation, and by extension no limits to the earth's abundance, if properly looked after. We return yet again to Evelyn's firm belief in the Covenant, the contract between the Creator and mankind: in return for love and care of his creation, the Creator promises it eternally and abundantly. It's unlikely that Evelyn's Land Girls had this thesis very much in mind at the time.

It's possible to think of A 1944 Pastoral as an allegory not just of Evelyn's Covenant but of the progress of World War 2 in the winter of 1944/5. The downfall of Hitler and the defeat of Germany seems assured, but maybe some distance away yet. Clearly it's not hard to attribute this or that allusion or reference after the event, but it does seem to me that there are similar prognostications in A 1944 Pastoral as in Sprout Picking, Monmouthshire from almost exactly a year earlier. Green, the colour of growth, and - if you take the idea a bit further - belief and trust in that growth, features strongly in both. As gardeners know, and as the old saying has it, growth follows the knife. The people involved in ensuring that growth are devoting themselves to it with determination and energy. I don't expect Evelyn intended deliberately to balance the calculated risk taken by the acrobatic Land Girl high in the apple tree with the risks taken by men on active service, but I don't think she would have dismissed the idea out of hand.

And then there's the border. The central picture is arresting enough in itself, the addition of the complementary border, at one or two points actually obtruding into the main scene, is a stroke of genius. We see the two types of saw, used for pruning the stouter branches, bright, clean and well maintained. Seven leather gloves with rolled cuffs (why?) hold seven secateurs, exquisitely drawn, none of them scissored but all, curiously, of the anvil type, in every conceivable pose, almost a kind of ballet.

Then there are the apples. We can admire Evelyn's subtlety in matching, on the white backgound of her plates and bowl, the colours of her apples with the colours in the pruning scene: the green Bramley, the red-patched Cox's Orange Pippin, the yellowish James Grieve or St Edmund's Pippin. These apples, of course, are the previous year's, so they're hardly yet the fruits of the victory that would be declared the following May 2nd, the first VE Day, but in Evelyn's mind they do represent the guarantee that the Covenant promise will be kept, and with hindsight we can applaud the confidence and optimism this painting expresses.

One apple is missing, from the lower right hand corner of the border. Why is it missing? Where has it gone? Has somebody anticipated the fruits of victory? I'm not certain, but in pondering this little conundrum, one of Evelyn's favourite quotes - in this case from Mark Twain - comes back to me, remembered from childhood: 'There ain't-a-going to be no core'. It was something she used occasionally as an all-purpose expression of finality, of closure, of the end of something, even a war:

There's plenty of boys that will come hankering and gruvvelling around when you've got an apple, and beg the core off you; but when they've got one, and you beg for the core and remind them how you give them a core one time, they make a mouth at you and say thank you 'most to death, but there ain't-a-going to be no core. (Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad)

(Original text © Christopher Campbell-Howes. All rights 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