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.)

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