Christmas cards 1951-54

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1951 Pre-publication presentation
 (?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection

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By the time Evelyn and Roger prepared their 1951 Christmas card they had already lived in The Elms, a pleasant late Victorian (1884) house half a mile or so from the Kentish hamlet of Hinxhill, for about a year. One of the features of this house was a modest conservatory built on to the west wall, with access from the garden and directly from Evelyn's studio.

Evelyn's design shows a faceless woman, the sort of Flora or Pomona or deity in representing Nature that we've seen in earlier Christmas cards, balancing a basket of grapes on one knee, surrounded by a vine from which stylised bunches of grapes hang. The prop on the right really did exist: the vine spread over most of the underside of the glazed roof and needing propping up. Beneath the drawing she has written 'Elms, Hinxhill, Ashford and sunshine in the vinery'.

Roger's most impenetrably Rogerish verse reads:

SOUS LES VIGNES [Under the vines]

Plucked in the autumn their rotund effulgence
Their saccharose store of celebratant
In the azurine spheroids conpendant:
Filtered in summer the actinic glare
By the exuberant emerald tissue
Enveloping its territory anew:
Exemplary plants, tho' unreasoning,
Reason's outmoded in their policy
Of - ramify, fortify, fructify!

They called this conservatory the 'vigne'. It was here that Evelyn painted my portrait, to be featured in a forthcoming essay, in 1954.

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1952 Pre-publication presentation
 (?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection

I pause briefly to reflect on what a useful gift annual Christmas cards of this type are to chroniclers and biographers.

Roger's verse reads:

OUTWARD BOUND

By the Statue of Liberty a mendicant mused,
Half-aloft in the twilight rubescent, suffused.
Remote from the fervour, relieved of the scale
Of the continent's life, he sought the true tale:

How destiny nested, migrant-like, among
The ambitious stones; began a universal Song
Whose echoing phrases rose in crescendo
From countless citizens on the sidewalk below.

Evelyn's illustration shows a female figure, another Flora or Pomona, clutching branches in either hand, cradled in an ectoplasmic cloud with a symbolic sun as its head. She has written 'Transatlantic journey' beneath. The reference is to Roger crossing the Atlantic to take part in a series of conferences in New York and elsewhere on the economics of fruit growing. On the outward bound leg of the journey he would have travelled with the sun, consistently with Evelyn's design. At the base of the design there's a suggestion of the Atlantic, which is relevant in an unexpected way: Roger (who went on his own) sailed to the United States, not simply because in 1952 the transatlantic passenger air service was fairly undeveloped, but also because after his wartime experiences he decided he never wanted to fly again.

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1953 Pre-publication presentation
 (?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection

Roger's verse reads:

DISCOVERY

What do you see within the hall?

Some pictures framed and on the wall.
What do you see within the frames?
The paint, resolving diverse claims.
What do you see within the paint?
The artist's eye, served with restraint.
What do you see within the eye?
Oh . . . colour, form, tonality . . .
And in these three what do you see -
Incomprehensibility?
 - Another's world; a mystery.

In the late autumn of 1953 Evelyn held the only retrospective solo exhibition of her career. It took place in Swanley Hall, Withersdane, a residential and administrative part of Wye College, a short distance outside the village. Evelyn's Christmas card design, underneath which she has written 'Wye exhibition' is simply about art exhibitions in general, not specifically about hers, so the work on display has no reference to her own paintings.

The exhibition was entitled 'Evelyn Dunbar - Paintings and Drawings 1936-1953'. In order to assemble the 26 paintings and drawings she had to 'borrow' most back from the galleries and private individuals into whose hands they had passed. An English Calendar was already in Withersdane (where it still is), and Wye from Olantigh had never left her studio.

The Imperial War Museum lent six of her wartime paintings, including Milking Practice with Artificial Udders and The Queue at the Fish Shop. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I believe she took advantage of having this last painting back in her own hands to add a tiny detail: the medal ribbon of the General Service Star on the left breast of the cycling RAF officer (actually, of course, Roger), which he could not have been awarded at the time the painting was delivered to the War Artists Advisory Committee.

The Education Department of Cambridgeshire County Council lent the iconic Joseph's Dreams. Mary Landale, her friend and former pupil at the Ruskin School, lent Dorset and The Poet Surprised by Autumn, an early version of what was to become Autumn and the Poet. Most fascinating for anyone, like myself, wanting to account for as much as Evelyn's work as possible, a Mr L.F.Herbert lent one, possibly two, of the trilogy of allegorical paintings featuring episodes in the that Genesis story of Joseph to which Evelyn attached such importance. Joseph's Dreams is the first of the three, followed by Joseph in the Pit and Joseph in Prison. The location of these last two is unknown.

I went to Evelyn's exhibition (I was 11) and have a very faint recollection of these last two, and of others in the Abraham-Isaac-Jacob-Joseph saga, notably A Ram Caught by his Horns in the Thicket (see Genesis, Chapter 22) and The Butler's and The Baker's Dreams. (Ibid., Chapter 40.) These recollections may easily be flawed. I suspect that the two missing Joseph paintings date from the years 1945-50, which Evelyn spent in the ambit of Oxford University. During this period, maybe as a release from the constraints of her war paintings, she turned a closer attention to allegory, represented by Oxford, Dorset, the so far lost Mercatora, the early versions of Autumn and the Poet - and these two Josephs, if they can be conveniently listed as such.

In the early 1950s Evelyn, who had a great gift for friendship, became a close friend of Eileen Skinner, a disabled journalist living in Wye and who often served as a model for the classes Evelyn used to run at The Elms. Few would have witnessed Evelyn at work in her studio more closely and for longer than Eileen Skinner, who is said by some commentators eventually to have became Evelyn's amanuensis. (I've never understood exactly what this meant: Evelyn took both pride and pleasure in her personal letters, and Roger was perfectly competent in dealing with household correspondence.) Eileen, who died in 2008, incidentally as Roger's next-door neighbour in Wye and predeceasing him by 5 months, recorded that Evelyn liked to paint repeatedly a subject that particularly appealed to her, especially her Joseph series.

I can endorse this to some extent. Long after Joseph's Dreams was sold to Cambridgeshire Education Authority in 1948, another version, whether earlier or later I don't know, used to hang above the dining-room door at The Elms. In the very sparse documentation of Evelyn's life and work there is sometimes a chance mention of a second version of a known painting (Dorset, for instance). Although plural versions may also turn out to be oil sketches, they further increase the number of Evelyn's paintings that are lost or unaccounted for, as well as befogging my recollections of what I did or didn't see all that time ago. 

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1954 Pre-publication presentation
 (?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection

I don't know whether this refers to something specific, some student relationship of which Evelyn and Roger were aware. Evelyn's drawing (she has added 'Student Life at Wye College' beneath) shows the narrowest of spaces between the two unidentified Wye College students. If some art can be defined by the space it occupies, the importance of the middle ground between the boy and the girl becomes evident. Any wider, and the implied closeness would be lost: any narrower, and their shoulders would be touching, and the point of Roger's very clever interior rhymes would be lost:

KALEIDOSCOPE

Youth of both sexes flexes demonstrably
Casting its wrapping, mapping new frontiers;
Learning to measure leisure by industry.
First, in alliance, science and ready mind;
Joy of retailing, detailing formulae.
Truantly, second, beckoned by fellowship;
Gone in a whirl a pearl of experience.
Third, a renewal. Refuel from text books;
Tests fast approaching; coaching and seminars.
Graduands totter, blotter all hieroglyphs;
Futures confront them, hunt them through latter days,
Loth to surrender tender claustrality.

There was no Christmas card for 1955.

(Original text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2013. 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

Wye from Olantigh (1953)

Evelyn Dunbar Wye from Olantigh 1953 (14" x 18": 35.5 x 45.8cm) Private collection

 Evelyn produced this most finished of her known landscapes in time for her only solo exhibition, held in the autumn of 1953 in Swanley Hall, Withersdane, a residential and administrative premises of Wye College. The exhibition was entitled 'Evelyn Dunbar - Paintings and Drawings 1938-1953'. There were 26 exhibits in all, many borrowed back from the Imperial War Museum, from other galleries and from private individuals to whom she had given or sold paintings. Her multi-frame An English Calendar was already there.

Olantigh is an estate a mile or two north of Wye, in Kent. We're in early summer, most likely of 1953. It wasn't a commission. It was painted for no other  - or better? - purpose than of recording a scene which pleased her. She may have had its eventual sale in mind, although Wye from Olantigh isn't signed. In the early 50s Evelyn had a loose arrangement with a London dealer, but her delivery of work was so erratic that the arrangement petered out. As always with a painting that particularly pleased her or which stated something important to her, she devoted a great deal of time, sometimes years, to finishing a canvas, that is - in Evelyn's case - giving it a depth of paint to exclude any suggestion of the canvas beneath. Certainly in Wye from Olantigh she has taken time to build up the relative thicknesses of layers of greens and yellows to express the intensity of the midday sun on the lush pastures of May in Kent, the Garden of England, although the outer branches and foliage do not have the same precision as, say, in A Land Girl and the Bail Bull.

These trees, beeches, oak and elm, are in full and proud leaf. Elm would disappear some 15 years later, victim of the Dutch elm disease which progressively destroyed all mature British elms as it moved northwards. The same view today would have several gaps in it, including the repoussoir trees on the left and right edges which lead the viewer's eye downwards towards the cattle in a shady nook and the blue-grey silhouette of the squat tower and nave of Wye Church, maybe half a mile away. A magical touch, worked with the tiniest of brushes, is the outline of the tower of Ashford Church on the horizon, some eight miles away in the heat haze. 

Pure landscape is one of the least known of Evelyn's activities. By 'pure' I mean landscape undertaken for the pleasure of recording it, not as the moral and symbolic backdrop against which so many of her outdoor dramas, especially the allegories and her wartime Women's Land Army paintings, are played out. Her pure landscapes, like Wye from Olantigh, are simply unadorned and unsentimental portraits of 'a landscape loved and worked in equal measure'. They are invariably - as far as I know: so much may be lost - of The Weald, that area of mostly fertile farmland and woodland of Kent and Sussex cradled by the North and South Downs.

In a sense her landscapes are the small change of her output. I suspect she gave many away as mementoes to friends or pupils. In an earlier essay I mentioned Evelyn's obituary in The Times, which presumably for lack of more accurate information claimed that after World War 2 she painted little but was 'absorbed in country pursuits'. I've sometimes wondered what the obituarist meant. Did she ride to hounds, make corn dollies, breed pheasants or angle for eels in the river Stour? (None of these sounds remotely like Evelyn.)

However country walks were a staple of her existence, and on the many country walks I remember sharing with her she was never without pencil, charcoal sticks and sketchbook. She would often stop to set down a field gate, a clump of trees, the set of some coppiced hazels, a bramble thicket, some middle-distance roof-tops, whatever.

This was her often daily communion with the land she loved. If there was something that especially took her eye she would return later, with easel and water-colours. Some artists feel a need continually, over and over again, to draw or paint a person they love, in all lights and circumstances and moods: with Evelyn it was the land. There was no need for the spectacular, snow- or cloud-capped mountains, waterfalls, rough seas; nor for anything chocolate-box or postcard-worthy, cottages with roses round the door, shepherd's delights: the Wealden landscape was enough and more.

(Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2013. 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 cards 1946-50

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1947 (February) Pre-publication presentation
 (?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection

(This and the following illustrations should enlarge if clicked on)

This was Evelyn's and her husband Roger's 'Christmas' card for 1946. For some reason, maybe connected with a delay at the printer's, it wasn't sent out until the February following, several weeks into 1947. Unusually, there is no verse from Roger.

Evelyn's entirely characteristic drawing of a young woman carrying a tray of such abundant fruit that some has spilled on to the ground is entirely in keeping with her beliefs about the Covenant, the contract between nature and mankind. The earth will be endlessly productive and generous, provided mankind looks after it properly, with skill, devotion and intelligence. At the time, Roger was working in the Oxford University Economic Research Institute, concentrating on agriculture.

The figure's hat, decorated with apples, pears and cherries, is a complete delight.

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1947 Pre-publication presentation
 (?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection

Roger's verse reads:

Before the leaves are full, green fruit buds burst
Into pink and white blossomings to light
A flowery arch 'neath which Pomona trips
And holds the stage through summer's play: at first
The fruit is set, then filled and swollen tight
Till falling leaves a curtain make. Our lips
Sound an approval sweet and oft-rehearsed
In winter's poesy, ere green buds burst.

At the foot of her drawing Evelyn has added, in her own handwriting, 'R. [i.e.Roger] begins to pursue the economics of fruitgrowing.'

Again, a most endearing hat, and a blossom-hemmed cloak to whirl round the dancing figure, whose swish and swoosh you can almost hear. Presumably she's Pomona, tripping on the light fantastic toe and holding the stage through summer's play, as in Roger's complementary poem. I can just remember the endless heavy snows of the winter of 1947: I wonder how many of Evelyn's and Roger's friends were warmed and cheered by this very original greeting?

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1948 Pre-publication presentation
 (?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection

Evelyn's dancing pig, captioned in her own hand 'The export drive....', moves as gracefully, in his way, and as energetically as Pomona from the year before, although maybe he hasn't yet realised that what is being exported is bacon and sausages...

Roger's somewhat compressed verse reads:

Leaf from our Notebook

Deck out these roughs as for export,
Despatch them to one's clientèle....
With cheerful word of good report
For Christmas and Année Nouvelle.

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1949 Pre-publication presentation
 (?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection 

Evelyn's very simple, and I expect last-minute, drawing shows - as she writes beneath - The Manor House at Enstone. Enstone was the Oxfordshire village to which Roger and Evelyn moved in March or April 1947, in order to be nearer Oxford, where they both worked, than their previous cottage in Long Compton, in Warwickshire.

Here Roger had an upstairs study in which Evelyn painted her second portrait of him, now known, in line with Roger's 2005 request, as The Cerebrant. Evelyn had much better studio facilities than at Long Compton, and Oxford, Summer Eights and the first studies for Autumn and the Poet were painted here. I remember clambering about on the wall at the front of the property until told to stop. 

Roger's unusually un-mystic verse reads:

Let no distance separate
Vision and the real state
Knock, and let us welcome you
To an annual rendez-vous.
See the garden and the ground,
Come inside and look around,
Climb upstairs and scan the view,
Share our simple tea for two.

 Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1950 Pre-publication presentation
 (?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection 

If Evelyn's and Roger's Christmas cards can be taken as a compressed joint biography, it's clear that in 1950 things changed radically for them. Evelyn's unusual - and very beautiful - drawing of the three Christian Graces, Faith, Hope and Charity, stand motionless in a space like the sort of carved niche in cathedral walls you often find weather-eroded statues of saints in. Faith and Charity are holding hands for mutual support. There's no movement, unlike the dancing pigs and Pomonas from the previous years. Faith and Charity are facing inwards, staring upwards, maybe questioningly, at the slightly taller figure of Hope, the only one of the three to look towards the viewer, and with a compelling irony Evelyn has drawn her without eyes to see, or indeed a face at all.

Underneath Evelyn has written 'The turn of the half century, with Faith, Hope and Charity'.

(Faith, Hope and Charity are personifications of three abstract qualities which St Paul wrote about in the New Testament, in his 1st Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13. 'Charity' has always given Bible translators problems, because there's no word in English to carry the full meaning of St Paul's original Greek word αγαπη, agapé, which means human love without necessarily any sexual element, the love of a mother for her child, the love one has for one's friends, and, especially in Evelyn's case, the love a creator can have for his or her creation. 'Platonic love' doesn't fully express St Paul's meaning either: it's wider and deeper than that. The King James Bible gives 'charity', more modern versions fall back on 'love'.)
It's as though these three women and what they stand for have been reduced to nothing, with only themselves to fall back on, as though they were saying to each other 'Was it for this that we worked so hard, that we suffered, and gave so much of ourselves?' Maybe Evelyn is calling to mind the sweat and sacrifice of so many of her war paintings, wondering whether it was all worth it, not in terms of the place of women in post-war Britain, but in the much wider world.

But at least Hope is there. Roger's sub-Tennysonian poem reads:

Athwart its diamond hangs the century,
And Time an even loading constitutes
Between th' opposing, vacillating scales
Which weigh the progress of humanity.
The dear-enbosomed hopes of fifty years,
Twice mortified, twice purified, again
Are withered in the blast of imminent
Catastrophe.
And yet defeat is not
The end, else would the sorry story cease.
New strength, fresh hopes, illimitable spans
Affirm resurgent viability.
Survival must foreshadow victory.

What 'imminent catastrophe' is this? A backward glance shows that towards the end of 1950 things really did look very black indeed. The Korean War is almost forgotten now, but in the late autumn and early winter of 1950 it seemed to US President Truman that the most expedient way to protect and preserve the pro-democratic, anti-communist government and people of South Korea from the invading Chinese communist forces, supported morally by Stalin's Russia, was to arrest their progress with atomic weapons, known at the time, with an apprehensive shiver, as the A-bomb, and a little later as the H-bomb. In other words, to unleash another Hiroshima. The Western world was horrified. This is the bewildered discouragement Evelyn's figures express.

(In fact the A-bomb was never used, and the war dragged on until an armistice was signed in 1953.)

In their personal lives much was about to change. In 1949 Wye College, the mid-Kent Horticultural Economics Department campus of Imperial College, London, advertised for an economist. Roger was appointed. He takes up the story:

Careerwise it was too good an opportunity to miss: for Evelyn it meant sacrifice, severance of her ties with the Ruskin and her friends there. I was to start at the beginning of the academic year 1950-51. Wye had many attractions. The College had international status and would give me a chance to make horticultural economics a recognised discipline. We would live on the spot and, being so much nearer, might expect the occasional visit of Evelyn's family. There had been no contact since we left in 1946. [Actually 1945] Evelyn accepted the sacrifice and was hauled off to a third new beginning.¹

Roger took up his appointment in September 1950. No house was immediately available, so for some weeks he commuted between Enstone, where Evelyn remained, and Wye, staying in hotels during the working week. This unsettled existence explains why the address on their 1950 Christmas card is still The Manor House, Enstone. A few weeks before Evelyn's 44th birthday in December, 1950, and after spending a final homeless week in which they 'lived from the car, retiring at night to one of four woodland clearing sites in rotation',² they took over the lease of The Elms, a large late Victorian house built in 1884, standing on its own on a ridge about 3 miles south-west of Wye.

I suspect there's some expression of personal feeling in Evelyn's drawing. She had loved Oxford, and the opportunities it had offered to develop her painting. All that was finished, although she continued to teach at the Ruskin as an occasional visitor. She may have taken some pride in Roger's rise in his professional field and the realisation of the role she saw him occupying as a sort of latter-day Biblical Joseph, agent of the Covenant. She may have well have entered the menopause just at the time when the promise of more settled circumstances might otherwise have led her to consider starting a family, despite having suffered a miscarriage at some unspecified time before. According to Roger, who was mostly silent about it, this miscarriage was caused by Evelyn's then habit of doing handstands against the wall, something which wouldn't have been in the least improbable for this very remarkable woman.

Despite these unpromising beginnings to the fourth and final part of her career, Evelyn came to love The Elms and Wye College. Their 1951 Christmas card, to be seen in due course, is much more positive.


¹ Roger Folley: Evelyn Dunbar: The Husband's Narrative (unpublished) May 2007
 

² ibid.

(Original text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2013. 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

Roger Folley ('The Cerebrant') (1948)

Evelyn Dunbar Roger Folley (later named The Cerebrant) 1948 (2'6" x 2'2": 76.5 x 66.4cm) Manchester Art Gallery: Author's photograph

 Evelyn completed this very fine second portrait of her husband, Roger Folley, in the late summer of 1948. She may have felt that the first rather liverish portrait she painted of him two years earlier did not show him to his best advantage.

At the time Roger, then 35, was working with the Oxford University Economics Research Institute, travelling into Oxford daily from their home at The Manor House, Enstone. Roger had made himself a study on the top floor of The Manor House, and it is here that Evelyn captured him in a characteristic pose: as Roger said to Evelyn's first biographer Gill Clarke, 'It's a celebration of Thinking (as distinct from Doing - with reason)'.

Family legend has it, however, that what Roger was actually doing was sitting very still, watching a flock of starlings in the trees and on an adjoining roof outside. It took Evelyn three afternoons to complete the main features, including Roger's bronzed face and arms. It had to be done in the afternoon because that was the time at which the summer sun streamed into Roger's study, making this painting as light and airy as its predecessor had been sombre.

The rest she finished at her leisure in time for the portrait to be presented, probably at Easter 1949, to Roger's father, E.W. Folley (1872-1968), a retired headmaster in the Lancashire town of Colne. Folley senior's parents had christened him Ebenezer William, Ebenezer being a name of some consequence in the unbending Methodist circles in which they moved. (Through some miracle of linguistic compression the original Old Testament Hebrew means in the King James version 'hitherto the Lord hath holpen us'.) For all that, he was known in and around Colne as 'Ebby' or 'Uncle Eb', and latterly, having devoted his later life to the promotion of music, literature and cricket in his native town, as 'Mr Colne'.

In 1948 he completed, for private publication the following February, a book called Romantic Wycoller, a history of a tiny community hidden in the folds of the North Lancashire Pennines, in which he tried to equate the Ferndean Manor of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre with the ruined Wycoller Hall.*

Wycoller Hall was once owned by a family of local magnates called Cunliffe. At Eb Folley's request, Evelyn made her only known foray into heraldry in her reproduction of the Cunliffe arms for her father-in-law's book, which I include for the sake of completeness and a certain Evelynish complicity in the owlishness of the owls and the joyous abandon of the rabbits - or, more strictly, coneys. (Coney = Coneyliffe = Cunliffe: in the argot of heraldry I believe this is called canting. And maybe Henry Cunliffe's wife's maiden name was really Owldham.)

Evelyn Dunbar: Armorial bearings of the Cunliffe family, frontispiece to E.W.Folley's Romantic Wycoller (1948)

In August 1948 Sarah Jane Folley, Roger's mother, died. (Romantic Wycoller is dedicated In Memoriam S.J.F.) As an act of family unity following her death Evelyn designated her portrait of Roger as a gift to her father-in-law the following year. Eb Folley kept it in what he called his front parlour, as a photo taken several years later shows:

E.W.Folley (extreme right), Evelyn's father-in-law, with friends. Evelyn's portrait of Roger Folley upper centre right. (Author's photograph)

 

It's possible that Evelyn took the opportunity of this visit to Colne to make the pencil sketch of E.W.Folley below:

Evelyn Dunbar E.W.Folley ?1949: Pencil on cartridge paper: Private collection: © The artist's estate

When Eb Folley died in 1968, Roger retrieved the portrait Evelyn had painted of him 20 years before. By that time Evelyn had been dead for 8 years. Roger kept it until 2005, when he felt the time had come to dispose of the few remaining paintings and drawings by Evelyn still in his possession. When Roger asked me to choose something by which to remember Evelyn, I asked him for this portrait, because I had long admired it, its creator and its subject. Alas! He had other ideas, of a wider generosity.

He wrote to me on February 28th, 2005 as follows (his sight was very poor: his typescript is reproduced exactly):

Full marks for art aooreciation.....and regret at denying you yout choice. I consider the 'pensive' portrait such a gem - I know nothing like it that everyone should share it, so I am aiming to hand it over to any appreciative Gallery. I do not doubt you will concur in this (greatest good...Approach.

Perhaps remembering his native county, Roger's chosen 'appreciative Gallery' was Manchester Art Gallery, where it still is. On making this gift Roger asked that henceforth the portrait should be entitled The Cerebrant, i.e. one who is thinking.


*E.W.Folley Romantic Wycoller Published privately February 1949. Reprinted 2004 by Hendon Publishing Co, Nelson, Lancashire, BB9 8AD 2004


(Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2013. 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

Summer Eights (1948)

Evelyn Dunbar Summer Eights 1948 Location unknown

In July 1946 Roger Folley, Evelyn's husband, successfully applied for a post with the Oxford University Economics Research Institute. As a result he and Evelyn left their cottage in Long Compton, inconvenient both in its size and distance from Oxford. They moved to Enstone, nearer to Oxford, to The Manor House, a premises much less grand than its name suggested. Here Evelyn enjoyed much better studio accommodation than at Long Compton.

Having moved to Enstone Evelyn, who had already been teaching at the Oxford School of Art since December 1946, made contact with the Ruskin School of Drawing and of Fine Art. Master of Drawing at the Ruskin School was Albert Rutherston, the younger brother of Sir William Rothenstein, one of the great men of British art in the inter-war period. (Because of the current anti-German feeling, Rutherston had anglicised his surname during the First World War.) Sir William Rothenstein had been a generous patron and good friend to Evelyn until his death in 1944, and it may be that she was acquainted with his brother.

At any rate, Evelyn was appointed Visitor, an interesting post requiring only occasional attendance. She already knew several of her fellow Visitors, some as close friends, either from her student days at the Royal College of Art, or as fellow professional artists, although their visits did not necessarily coincide: Barnett Freedman, Muirhead Bone, Allan Gwynne-Jones, John Piper. Albert Rutherston retired in 1949, and Percy Horton, who had been one of Evelyn's tutors at the Royal College of Art and who had kept in touch with her ever since, became the new Master of Drawing. Evelyn felt among friends and very comfortable at the Ruskin, continuing her Visitorship long after she left the Oxford area to live in Kent.

It was via the Ruskin School that Evelyn was commissioned by Worcester College Junior Common Room to paint Summer Eights. Worcester College JCR, like several other Oxford colleges, maintained a fund for the purchase of art works 'by the younger British artists', to quote a contemporary outline of the scheme. (In 1947, when the commission was placed, Evelyn was 40.) There's a little uncertainty about the title. The official title was The River in Eights Week 1922. However, Evelyn's painting was reproduced in a book engagingly called To teach the senators wisdom, or an Oxford guidebook, written in 1952 by the then Provost of Worcester College, J.C. Masterman, where it is entitled The river Eights Week, 1922. Evelyn, who included it in the only solo exhibition she ever put on, in Wye College, Kent, in 1953, always referred to it as Summer Eights, but then in Oxford terms 'Summer Eights' and 'Eights Week' are synonymous.

In the summer of 1957 I spent a week with Evelyn at Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire. She was working on a mural project which was later abandoned. She and I stayed that week with some Oxford friends of Evelyn's who had a house on the Woodstock Road. During this week she took me to Worcester College to see Summer Eights. I'm glad to have seen it (although I'd already seen it once at Evelyn's 1953 exhibition), because it's very doubtful if another opportunity will arise for me, or for that matter anyone else, to see it: Summer Eights was stolen in 1994.

I wish I could find any significance in the date 1922 in the alternative titles. The river is the Thames, or that Oxford stretch of it called the Isis. Despite its name Eights Week is a four-day rowing regatta held annually in May, during which coxed 8-man or 8-woman boats from the various Oxford colleges try to out-row each other. As the Isis is too narrow to allow side-by-side races, something which doesn't really come out in Evelyn's painting, the tournament is organised, after many preliminary heats, on a pursuit basis. A successful pursuit occurs when the following boat catches up with and touches, or 'bumps' the boat ahead of it. The eight which manages to out-bump or out-row all the others is deemed Head of the River.

At first I imagined that Worcester College had become Head of the River in 1922, and on checking this I was surprised to find that Worcester College had never attained any Eights Week honours, although their 2nd VIII had won a similar tournament, then known as Torpids, in February of that year. For a moment I wondered if Evelyn had painted the Torpids, and not the May competition at all. However, if she had meant Torpids she would have called it so, or would very soon have been corrected. In any case there are far too many leaves on the trees for the scene to be set in February.

Gill Clarke, Evelyn's first biographer, surmises that 1922, when New College became Head of the River, was the heyday of Oxford University rowing, and thus her painting celebrates the overall event rather than any individual triumph. Certainly Evelyn has captured a sense of occasion, maybe as envisaged from an upstream point like Folly Bridge. The college boathouses, sometimes shared between rowing clubs, line the left bank, beneath the trees bordering Christ Church Meadows. Some boathouses are identifiable by the rowing club flags flying above them: Exeter, Lincoln and Oriel colleges are among the first four on the left. The pink cap and black blazer of the cox in the foreground denotes, as might be expected, the Worcester College VIII. Close examination of the rowers' kit and their oar-blades also suggests Maltese crosses, the badge of Worcester College Boat Club.

Supporters crowding the boathouse roofs put me in mind of an Edwardian novel Evelyn knew and had on her bookshelves, Max Beerbohm's 1911 Oxonian fantasy Zuleika Dobson. At the novel's climax, the entire - minus one, the egregious Noaks - Oxford undergraduate population, taken by Beerbohm as then exclusively male, throws itself into the river during Eights Week for love of Miss Dobson. (Having wrought this havoc, Miss Dobson requires her lady's maid to find out times of trains to Cambridge.) The right bank is also well peopled, including an engaging girl looking round and up at the college-scarved adult next to her: Evelyn has painted her with the minimum of detail but summarises her character and happy mood with a few deft brushstrokes. The slightly disturbed water surface, mirroring the boathouse flags, is exquisitely painted, a little foray into impressionism that Evelyn enjoyed now and then.

The painting is very soundly constructed, and seasoned viewers of Evelyn's paintings will instantly recognise the left-to-right directionality and the skilled mastery of a perspective in which one of the major lines is provided by the boat itself. I can't interpret confidently what the Worcester College crew is doing. Resting on their oars? Waiting for the start gun? The other crew, in the middle distance, is clearly working very hard. The perspective lines lead us, figuratively, to the head of the river, and the objective of it all, and maybe this is another of Evelyn's gentle visual puns. 

Summer Eights is an exceptional painting. Although it could be claimed that most of Evelyn's war paintings represent a message-loaded reportage, this is the only painting from Evelyn's hand which celebrates her approximation of an actual past event purely for the joy of it. The thief knew what he or she was stealing.

Many thanks to Emma Goodrum, Archivist of Worcester College, Oxford, for her help in the preparation of this commentary.

(Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2013. 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