Evelyn Dunbar: February 2013

Thursday, 21 February 2013

Market Garden in Holland (1956?)

Evelyn Dunbar Market Garden in Naaldwijk 1956(?) (c.10" x 12": 25 x 30cm) Location unknown

I've known this endearing little composition for a long time. It's one of the very few, six or seven, of Evelyn's paintings that her husband Roger kept with him long after her death in 1960, almost until his own death in 2008. I don't know what happened to it. Apart from its benign and unassuming harmony, I think he had a particular reason for keeping it, which I'll come to in a moment.

The hands just visible at the sides are Roger's. He's holding the painting up to be photographed in the same circumstances, that's to say in his sister's garden in Scotland, as the 1946 portrait Roger Folley. The photo above is one I took of the original photo, itself taken in the mid-1980s.

It wasn't until I began to look very closely at this little landscape that I realised that there was something quite unusual about it. It was the central church spire that alerted me: it didn't really say 'Kent', which is where, together with Sussex, the great majority of Evelyn's landscapes are set. There are no figures in it, so it's hardly likely to be a leftover from her wartime paintings.

The other roof-lines didn't suggest The Weald, either. Although the greenhouses might be anywhere, the turreted outline of a sort of fortress on the centre left, the spire, the pitch of the tiled roof with the gable end facing us, the capped tower on the centre right all suggested Northern Europe. But where?

Roger's work as a lecturer at Wye College and as a leading horticultural economist in his own right often took him abroad. Usually he went on his own or with colleagues, but in or about 1956 he went to Naaldwijk, in Holland, partly to gather material for his book, now out of print, called Tomatoes the Dutch Way. On this occasion Evelyn went with him.

Roger sometimes regretted that Evelyn showed little interest in painting anything but her beloved Kent and Sussex. In the summer of 1956 he and Evelyn spent two weeks on the Italian Riviera, based on a little seaside place called Ospedaletti. (They very kindly took me with them.) Despite exploration into the mountainous Ligurian hinterland and along the excitingly picturesque coast as far as Portofino and Santa Margherita, Evelyn produced nothing but a few sketches. Although finding material for Evelyn to paint wasn't the chief purpose of the holiday, I think Roger sometimes found it hard to come to terms with Evelyn's first source of inspiration being from the land, and what it might produce when intelligently looked after. The Covenant, again.

So maybe it's not surprising that her accompanying Roger to Holland resulted in Market Garden in Naaldwijk (this is my title, incidentally, for want of a better...but see below!), Evelyn's only painting recording something outside the United Kingdom. Maybe we won't be so very far from the truth if we imagine Evelyn setting up her summer easel in some Dutch market garden where the balance of indoor and outdoor cultivation, and of the buildings in the background, produced a harmonious and comfortable scene. Meanwhile Roger may be in those very greenhouses discussing their methods with his Dutch hosts. And, almost the last of an excessive series of maybes, I wonder if travelling away together from home for Roger to work while Evelyn painted pleasantly recalled some of their shared wartime experiences?

Thanks to Jane England for her help in the preparation of this commentary, and to Corry Frantzen-Schreuder of Naaldwijk for identifying the scene as the former Proefstation voor de groente- en fruitteelt onder glas (Test station for fruit and vegetable cultivation under glass), now reborn as the World Horti Centre. So, Naaldwijk, yes, but Market Garden, no. If the present owner reads this, please feel free to change the title. But I wasn't far out!

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

Wednesday, 6 February 2013

Portrait (1954)

Evelyn Dunbar Christopher Campbell-Howes at 12 1954 (14" x 12": 35.5 x 30.5) Private collection

Evelyn painted this portrait in 1954, when I was 12. Only the head was finished, the rest was merely sketched in for later completion. The setting was a small conservatory Roger and Evelyn had on the western side of The Elms, the pleasant Edwardian house they rented about half a mile from the hamlet of Hinxhill, some three miles south of Wye. They called this the 'vigne', or sometimes the 'vinery'. It featured in their 1951 Christmas card.

I remember sitting for it, but not much else. Six years later, when Evelyn died, it was found among the 40-50 canvases stacked up on shelves in the store next to her studio in the last house she and Roger lived in, a place called Staple Farm, up on the North Downs not far from Wye. After Evelyn's death this portrait passed to my mother, who inscribed the frame 'Evelyn Dunbar RA 1954'. This is curious, because Evelyn was never a Royal Academician and was known not to agree with what the Royal Academy stood for, at the time.

In the 1950s Evelyn painted or drew an unknown quantity of portraits, maybe a dozen, sometimes as commissions and sometimes as gifts. Naturally very few have circulated outside the families they were intended for.

Evelyn Dunbar Boy Reading 1960 Oil on wood Private collection

Boy Reading was among the last portraits Evelyn painted. The subject is Evelyn's nephew by marriage (and my half-brother) Richard Campbell-Howes. Richard had gone, as he sometimes did, to stay with Roger and Evelyn in the winter of 1959-60, when he was 11.

He's wearing Evelyn's sheepskin slippers, of the type we have also seen in Land Army Girls Going to Bed. I couldn't say if it's the same pair, but clearly nephews may wear their aunts' slippers. He's sitting on a bentwood chair, a bound 19th Century volume of Punch open on his lap. The setting is one end of Evelyn's studio in Staple Farm. The colours of the slippers and of an Indian numdah rug, then fairly newly fashionable, pick up and complement the hanging drape behind, which itself reveals, in the top left hand corner, one of the roof timbers, a deft harmonisation of colours and textures for which Evelyn had such an acumen.

According to Richard it was fairly quickly executed, within three days, which isn't surprising: that pose can't have been very comfortable to hold for long periods. It's painted on wood, which is unusual for Evelyn, and close examination shows one or two worm-holes. Less than five months after painting it, Evelyn was dead.

For a non-specialist portrait painter, the quantity and range of Evelyn's portraits is not to be underestimated. Some we've seen in these essays already. Their quality is uneven: some may find the rather vacant Portrait of an Airwoman as unrewarding as Section Officer Austen is a convincing and attractive study of a young woman concentrating. There's a similar disparity between the two portraits of her husband, the uncharacteristically peevish and vinegary Roger Folley of 1945 and Roger Folley (The Cerebrant) of 1948, in which Roger is transformed into a bronzed and visionary intellectual, which is much nearer the mark. Although mine was never finished, after Evelyn's death Roger gave both portraits to his sister, our mother Joan.

(Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2013 and 2022. All rights reserved.)