Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1951 Pre-publication presentation
(?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection
(?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection
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
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, featured elsewhere in this collection, in 1954.
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, featured elsewhere in this collection, in 1954.
Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1952 Pre-publication presentation
(?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection
(?) 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
(?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection
Roger's verse reads:
DISCOVERY
What do you see within the hall?
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' many back from the galleries and private individuals into whose hands they had passed. An English Calendar was already in Withersdane, 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. This last raises an interesting question: what right does an artist have to alter, cancel or otherwise amend a work after it has been sold or otherwise disposed of? I raise the question because I believe Evelyn took advantage of having this last painting back in her own hands to add a surreptitious tiny detail: the medal ribbon of the General Service Star on the left breast of the cycling RAF officer - modelled on 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.
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.
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' many back from the galleries and private individuals into whose hands they had passed. An English Calendar was already in Withersdane, 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. This last raises an interesting question: what right does an artist have to alter, cancel or otherwise amend a work after it has been sold or otherwise disposed of? I raise the question because I believe Evelyn took advantage of having this last painting back in her own hands to add a surreptitious tiny detail: the medal ribbon of the General Service Star on the left breast of the cycling RAF officer - modelled on 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.
Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1954 Pre-publication presentation
(?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection
(?) 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
448 pages, 300 illustrations. £25
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