April (1937/38)

April 1937/38 Oil on canvas Photo: Richard Valencia © Christopher Campbell-Howes. Private collection

April is the third and last realisation in oils of the original pen-and-ink month-personification drawings Evelyn had made for the Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary. 

April's immediate predecessor maybe carried a slightly different impact...

April 1937 Pen and ink drawing for Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary. Author's photograph

Here is April, backed by a shower-cloud, advancing down the garden path gingerly, balancing simultaneously a heavy pot-grown apple tree, an empty cold frame and the most fantastic hat in all Evelyn's work. The branches of the apple tree have been espaliered to form the word April: leaves are sprouting and the first blossoms have broken out here and there. Whatever the cold frame once contained has now gone. As for her hat, there is a standard selection of spring flowers, but the most intriguing feature is a bird's nest with two small birds that the later oil version suggests might be greenfinches vainly trying to see off a cuckoo about to lay her egg in their nest. It may be too much to link this symbol of unexpected and unwelcome new life - unexpected and unwelcome at least to the greenfinches - with April apparently wearing a maternity dress, in the context of the months elapsed since August, subject of the previous post. Evelyn's husband Roger Folley once suggested to me that there was an allusion here to T.S.Eliot, without being more specific. Knowing Evelyn's love of allusion, I suspect - if Roger's suggestion is viable - that Evelyn may have had the famous first lines of Eliot's The Waste Land in mind: 'April is the cruellest month, […] mixing Memory and desire […]'

The oil version of April has several slight differences in design from the drawing: the garden path has gone, along with the spring flowers; the famous hat is even more fantastical, giving an extra prominence to the cuckoo in the nest. April is framed inside a box opening on to a sky much less promising of rain than in the drawing. The box, also a feature of Joseph's Dream, may have an unwitting importance: it implies a psychological need for security and protection, something that Evelyn was certainly short of in the immediate post-Mahoney period.

  Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2017  

 

  

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

                                                 

                                                               

August (1937-38)

August 1937 Oil on canvas Photograph Michael Shaw ©The author

August is the second of the three oil versions of month-personifications which Evelyn had earlier produced in pen-and-ink form for her Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary. (The first was February, subject of the previous post; the third was April, which will appear in the next post.)

There's some autobiographical background to this rather heavy and overblown image, one of the very few in Evelyn's work in which the subject is facing out of the frame, as though she was looking for something or someone that has gone, for something beyond the immediacy of the lush headiness of her surroundings.

Four years earlier, in the early summer of 1933 as she was about to leave the Royal College of Art and begin her career, Evelyn started an affair with one of her tutors, the artist - and particularly muralist - Charles Mahoney, who was some three years her senior. Although both Evelyn and Mahoney worked together by day on the Brockley Murals furtherance of the relationship was difficult and frustrating. Neither had their own home. Neither lived in circumstances where the bringing in of a young man/woman would be viewed favourably. The problem of spending quality time and intimacy together was solved partially by going to stay with friends, mostly colleagues of Mahoney. Typical of these were the artist Edward Bawden and his wife Charlotte, doyens of the group of artists gathered round the village of Great Bardfield in Essex. Given Evelyn's and Mahoney's love of plants and gardening and their readiness to involve themselves in their friends' gardens, it didn't take long for them to be nicknamed 'Adam and Eve'. Indeed Evelyn sometimes refers to herself as the Biblical Eve in the illustrated letters she frequently sent Mahoney. They never married. Evelyn would have liked to marry him, but Mahoney refused to be pinned down, claiming that marriage and children would jeopardise her career as an artist. While it can hardly be said that she threw herself at him, undoubtedly she gave him plenty of encouragement: here she is in provocative pose, proffering the apple of temptation, in a pictogram signature on a postcard she sent him in 1934. (I think the fruit have to be gourds, making the word 'gourdgeous', i.e. gorgeous.)

One of her letters from the following summer contains this image of herself as Eve...

...and underneath she has written 'Notice the absence of the serpent - I find smacking his bottom is best - he simply vanishes away then. Try it.' What does she mean? Has the Old Adam been importunate? Or the Old Eve, for that matter? Or is this a general exhortation to square up to temptation and send it packing?

And another letter from September 1936 contains a sort of mild period sexting:

 (These excerpts have been taken from the extraordinary collection of letters, 1933-39, from Evelyn to Mahoney - no replies survive - which are lodged in the Tate Archive, the gift of Elizabeth Bulkeley, Charles Mahoney's daughter. My photographs: © The Estate of Evelyn Dunbar)

In the summer of 1937 Evelyn was working on her drawings for the Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary and finalising the text and drawings for Gardeners' Choice, the book she and Mahoney produced jointly, which appeared in the late autumn. In the final stages they worked together: Mahoney had found, or Evelyn had found for him, temporary lodgings in Rochester, a 20-minute walk from The Cedars, the Dunbars' house across the Medway in Strood. The relationship had been coming apart for over a year. Maybe this was Evelyn's last despairing attempt to save it. It failed. By early September Mahoney had disappeared, retreating to the outer edges of Evelyn's life.

In the context of the Eve/Evelyn sketches, it's interesting to compare the oil version of August above with the earlier pen-and-ink version below, which appeared in the Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary. For one thing it's striking, and typical of Evelyn's spirited imagination, that the serpent has turned into a garden hose. I leave readers, who may wish to move on quickly having registered the inference of the pump, to draw their own compare-and-contrast conclusions. In fact between completion of the drawing below and the oil version, Evelyn miscarried.

August 1937 from the Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary

Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2017

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

February (1937-38)

February 1937-38 Oil on canvas Photo: P van der Wal © Liss Llewellyn Fine Art. Private collection.

This striking and subtle image of February started life as a pen-and-ink drawing in Gardener's Diary for 1938. At the time the magazine Country Life produced occasional satellite booklets, among them diaries and cookbooks, under the supervision of Noël Carrington, a publisher who went on to found Puffin Books. Dunbar knew Carrington, his wife Catherine and their daughter Jane very well through having lodged with them for a while during her student days in their home in South End Road, Hampstead. She and her former tutor and later lover Charles Mahoney also rented a top-floor studio from Carrington in the mid-30s. The 1937 Gardener's Diary was designed and illustrated by Edward Bawden, whom Evelyn knew well through her visits with Mahoney to Brick House, Bawden's home in Great Bardfield, the Essex village that was to some extent the spiritual - and sometimes actual - home of a group of English artists including Eric Ravilious, Charles Mahoney and John Aldridge. To entrust the Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary to Evelyn meant, at the least, keeping it in the family, so to speak.

February from Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary. Author's photo.

Here is February sloshing furtively through the rain in her oilskin and wellies to magic into life what looks like a cyclamen under her cloche. Clearly the image pleased her, and when, a month or two after she had finished her Gardener's Diary images, Evelyn decided to work some of them up into oils, she chose three: February, April and August. 

April and August carry quite disturbing autobiographical messages, and we'll postpone looking at them until we've enjoyed February in her innocent complicity. I don't think February tells us anything much about her personal life at the time, but I can imagine Evelyn's delight in returning to her Gardener's Diary drawing to develop further her personification of this secret and secretive month. Her oil version has the same furtiveness, the same reluctance to be observed, in the same way as the first growth of the year appears almost imperceptibly. In the drawing she's secreting a cyclamen under a cloche. In the oil version we aren't told what she is touching into growth: maybe bulbs like the ones from which grew the new, tight-budded daffodils in her extraordinary hat.

Copies of Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary are extremely rare. I'm very grateful to the Royal Horticultural Society's Lindley Library for making its copy available to me, and for allowing me to take photographs.

(Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2017)

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