'Peeling Apples', c.1922

 

 

'Peeling Apples': Pen and wash, c.1922. Photograph: Anton Liss ©Modern British Art Gallery

Equal portions of chagrin and delight for the Evelyn Dunbar enthusiast: chagrin that such an interesting and revealing image should appear too late for inclusion in available biographies of Evelyn, and delight at the discovery of something new from her juvenilia, especially when it foreshadows, as this pen and wash drawing does, some of the important themes of her mature work.

In 1908, when Evelyn was rising two, the Dunbar family moved from Reading to Kent, renting a short succession of properties in lower Medway riverside villages before moving in 1913 into 244 High Street, Rochester. This was a three-storey weatherboarded house with street-level shop premises and a modest garden behind. From here Evelyn's Scottish father William (seen wearing his hat in the drawing above) carried on his drapery, bespoke tailoring and dressmaking business. Evelyn's mother Florence, seen here peeling apples taken from the cloth at her feet, was an enthusiastic amateur artist - hinted at by the easel behind her - specialising in floral still-lifes who gave her youngest daughter much encouragement.

When Evelyn was 11 she won a Kent County Council scholarship to Rochester Grammar School for Girls, which later counted her among its most celebrated alumnae and named buildings and facilities after her. Her art teacher was George Ward, a gifted teacher who was also closely connected with the Rochester (later Medway) School of Art. Ward's practical teaching can perhaps be seen in Evelyn's sectioning of her image with vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines in the approved manner, preparatory to making a larger image, maybe in a different medium.

Evelyn's scene, drawn when she was 14 or 15, is a rare interior of the Dunbars' house at 244 High Street, Rochester. (The house is still there, or was when I explored the area in 2014, on a raised pavement called The Banks, opposite the old Rochester station forecourt. No blue plaque, however.) We can assume that we're in the kitchen, and that the fire, or more probably the range, has been lit, partly to dry the washing hanging on the clothes horse on the left.

Following Evelyn's left-to-right travel, a constructional device very common in narrative painting probably deriving from the way we read, we see her self-image squatting on a low footstool with her hair wrapped in a towel; it's hair-wash time, and barely visible and loosely defined in the background are her older sisters Jessie and Marjorie washing each other's hair, although which is which is uncertain.

Evelyn's father is just to her left. An intriguing photograph of William Dunbar, possibly contemporary with Evelyn's drawing, shows him as a portly, tallish man of about 60. He has removed his hat for the camera and is holding it in his right hand. Someone, probably Florence, has written 'Lord de Dunbar and his charming daughters' on the back.

 

William Dunbar flanked by two of his daughters, c.1922: Evelyn (L) and Jessie (R). Dunbar family archive.

He appears via Evelyn's brush a few years later in a family group set in the garden of The Cedars, the house in Strood (the trans-Medway part of Rochester) which William bought in 1924.

 

  'The Dunbar Family in the Garden at The Cedars' Oil on paper, c.1928. Photograph ©Liss Llewellyn Fine Art. Private collection.

Evelyn has included the whole family in this quasi-Impressionist study. Central pride of place is given to William and Florence, with their sons Ronald and Alec in the left hand middle ground, balanced by Jessie and Evelyn knocking a badminton shuttlecock about in front of the summer-house and Marjorie, with a bunch of narcissi, playing with the cat in the right foreground. (The features are too indeterminate for positive identification, but as Marjorie was the most fashion-conscious of the sisters and as to my knowledge Evelyn never owned a striped blazer I have made the most appropriate assumption.) Florence is identified with the mulberry tree behind her, not yet in full leaf, as though the branches represent the expanding family of which she might in time become the grand progenetrix. (In fact all but Alec died childless.)

William, who kept hens whenever his circumstances allowed, is offering Florence a handful of eggs. Evelyn has thus shown him as a provider, a sort of enabling middleman between Nature and Humanity. It's not hard to equate the status she has given him with his stance in 'Peeling Apples' above, where he is pointing at the apples he has provided. In both his left hand occupies an almost exactly central position. Is this accidental or deliberate? I wonder.

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2019

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