Evelyn Dunbar: March 2018

Monday 19 March 2018

Sacking Potatoes, 1948

Sacking Potatoes 1948 Oil on canvas Private collection

Now, what's this? At the outset I ought perhaps to put up a conjecture alert. Not much of what follows can be proved, and I may be entirely wrong. The main ingredient in my scenario is more-or-less intelligent guesswork. I hope that at the very least it's logical.

Sitting and staring at Sacking Potatoes, a necessary process for any picture for any art commentator, doesn't reveal all that much. It's in the same vein as several of Evelyn's agricultural war paintings, and might be mistaken as such: groups of women in pairs (I can't identify any men) are trailing sacks between them, traversing a field in line abreast picking up potatoes previously unearthed by a tractor and potato spinner. The women are not Land Girls, or they would be wearing some sort of Women's Land Army uniform. They presumably belong to a field labour group hired for the occasion by the farmer. It's hard to determine any logical progression; the middle group appears to be covering the same ground as the more distant group. I'm led to think that whatever the purpose of Evelyn's design, it wasn't necessarily to record a maybe not-very-interesting potato harvesting scene. She had something else in mind.

Enter Glynn Burton, a former Leeds University fellow-student of Roger Folley, Evelyn's husband, who became a lifelong friend. As it happens, we've met him before, not as an agricultural scientist but as a rock-climbing mouse. Glynn Burton had found his post-war feet working as a researcher and advisor at the Ditton Laboratory, an offshoot of the Cambridge Low Temperature Research Station near Maidstone. In 1948 he completed a book called The Potato: A Survey of its History and of Factors Influencing its Yield, Nutritive Value and Storage. It became the standard work on potato cultivation and is still in print today. He asked Evelyn if she would design the cover. She agreed readily, but I wonder if Burton's request was made before or after he had composed the title. In the event The Potato etc. appeared with an unexciting and quite un-Evelynish drawing of a potato on the cover.

The Potato: A Survey of its History and of Factors influencing its Yield, Nutrition, Value and Storage. Original cover, first edition, 1948

We move forward 11 or 12 years. Evelyn died in May 1960. Within two years the house she and Roger had lived in was sold and her entire residual studio of some 800 pieces of artwork was boxed and bundled up and consigned to Evelyn's family. Or almost her entire residual studio: Roger kept back a small quantity of her work, paintings and drawings of which he was fond or which had a particular meaning or importance to him or those about him. Among them was Sacking Potatoes. He kept it until about 1985, when he gave it to an art specialist with a deep interest in Evelyn's work. Why did he keep it? What special meaning did it have for him?

I think Sacking Potatoes was Evelyn's design for Glynn Burton's book. I once printed out the image above and folded it with four proportionate vertical folds so as to make a book cover of it, one fold for the front flap, two for the spine, one for the back flap. It worked almost perfectly. Evelyn's wrap-around design allowed for a central spine and back and front fold-in flaps, with blank space for the publisher's blurb inside the back flap. But...oh dear, that title: 'The Potato' would have worked brilliantly, arranged between the upper and central groups of sack-women, with the author's name below. But not Burton's full 17-word title. Did the publisher cavil at the expense, indeed the impossibility, of threading the title and author's name among Evelyn's deliberately arranged teams of women? Was the project abandoned, living on only as a modest canvas in Evelyn's store and in Roger's memory as a regretted might-have-been? The questions remain unanswered and we shall never know, merely acknowledging the possibility.

Grateful thanks to Agneta Burton and to England & Co. for their help with this commentary.

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2023

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

Thursday 15 March 2018

Flying Applepickers (1946)

In late 1945 Evelyn and her husband Roger Folley, now demobilised from the RAF, moved from Kent to Warwickshire, setting up their first married home, a cottage simply called No. 8, in the village of Long Compton. They'd been told about the availability of this cottage by Roger Folley's sister, Joan Duckworth, who lived next door at The Old Orchard. (This is the house in the picture with chimneys at each gable end. No.8, which Evelyn and Roger later called Vyner's after the earliest owner they could identify in the title deeds, has the lower roofline to the right.)

The 1945 apple crop was immense. Some light-hearted banter between the sisters-in-law about how it should be harvested led to this little fantasy. Roger Folley on the extreme left looks up disbelievingly, as well he might, at this flock of flying applepickers appearing out of the sky. Evelyn - or it might be Joan Duckworth - looks on from the lower right.

Evelyn's easy mastery of figures and drapes perhaps harks back to a similar, although more studied, exercise from some ten years previously. In 1935 she was finishing the ceiling roundels at Brockley County School for Boys, now Prendergast - Hilly Fields 6th Form Centre, in Lewisham, south-east London. You can find them here. Her Brockley subjects, Olympian goddesses, abstract figures like Industry or Virtue, are much grander than her homely Long Compton applepickers.

In 2016, in the course of research for the book mentioned below, my wife Josephine and I went to Long Compton to explore for ourselves the background of Flying Applepickers and other paintings of this period. We were very warmly received (it doesn't always happen) by the present owner of The Old Orchard, who showed us round inside and out. And 'Blow me down' - to use one of Evelyn's expressions - one of the apple trees in Flying Applepickers was still there, 70 years on. A very ancient and feeble specimen, it's true, but an extraordinary witness to the actuality of Evelyn's fantasy.

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2018