Hercules and the Waggoner 1933 Oil on paper 18
x 10in (45.7 x 25.4cm) Photograph ©Liss Llewellyn Private collection
In late 1932, when Evelyn was partway through her postgraduate fourth year at the Royal College of Art, she was approached by Charles Mahoney, her mural tutor, with a view to joining his team of recent RCA graduates to paint murals at Brockley School for Boys, a grammar school in south-east London. She agreed readily, excited by the prospect of working on large surfaces, not to mention by the prospect of working with Mahoney, with whom she was soon to fall in love.
Initially the scheme was limited to five arched and slightly recessed panels in the school hall, each measuring 12' x 7' (3.66 x 2.13m). Four of these panels were to be painted by recent graduates, while Mahoney, a noted muralist, reserved the fifth for himself. Evelyn was consulted about the subject matter of the five panels, and came up with several suggestions, mostly with some obvious relevance to boys' grammar school life, but by January 1933 her ideas had been sidelined in favour of illustrations of Aesop's fables. At that stage no one else had volunteered for the project, so Evelyn prepared several studies in case she was required to paint more than one panel.
She entitled one of her studies Hercules and the Waggoner, which tells of a waggoner whose tip cart breaks down: the waggoner calls on Hercules to use his fabulous strength to re-mount the wheel, only to be told from on high that the gods help those who help themselves and that the waggoner should put his own shoulder to the wheel before calling on divine intervention. Evelyn's design includes several vignettes: the waggoner and his broken-down cart with its load of spilled cabbages or turnips; the horse taking advantage of the halt to browse among the wayside verge; an unscathed cart farther up the lane; some women working in a ploughed field and pointing upwards at the Olympian apparition; in the top right-hand corner - often Evelyn's preferred position for something surprising and challenging - a road lined with telegraph poles, taking us a long way from ancient Greece and slap into the present; and in the top left-hand corner, directed by a farmer in gaiters and billycock hat, some women planting potatoes. (Another anachronism, of course: by the time potatoes were introduced into Europe, the Olympian gods and goddesses must surely have worn out their pension books.)
Evelyn did her homework. A letter dated 'January 22nd, 933' (!) to Oliver Simon is one of several preserved in the Cambridge University Library. Oliver Simon, nephew of the RCA Principal Sir William Rothenstein, lived in Hampstead, not far from Evelyn's student lodgings. His and his wife Ruth's dining table, at which Evelyn was a frequent guest, was known as a lively hub of young artists, particularly those from the Rothenstein stable. She wrote:
This morning I drew out of doors at a farm on the top of the hill. I am making drawings of tip carts [...] for my decoration design. The farmer is a silent but kindly man, who has carts pulled out for me when I want. Everything looked so lovely today in the winter sunshine. I walked across a huge ploughed field in one of the ruts newly made, it felt so strange in the middle, like being at sea!
Evelyn's letters were usually illustrated, and this one is no exception. To make her point she has added a little drawing of herself as not much more than a black dot among the ruts of a field whose outline surely has a bearing on the other ploughed fields in this little group:
We move forward nearly 90 years, and the discovery of a curious canvas, of impeccable provenance if not the loveliest piece Evelyn ever painted. It looks as if Evelyn has scraped most of the paint off. The design is almost exactly that of the vignette of women planting potatoes in Hercules and the Waggoner. There's a faint irregular black line scrawled across the canvas, and we may wonder what purpose it serves. It seems to echo in some way the construction, the design of the group of women, and especially the trees and building in the background…
'Potato Field' 1933 Oil sketch on canvas Photograph ©Liss Llewellyn
…and then suddenly, like an optical illusion clicking into place, if the faint black line between the farmer and the women is turned to the vertical, and the whole image is turned anti-clockwise through about 30°, the background shifts to the left, hiding some of the woodland, and opens up to the right, and Evelyn's sketch turns into something else:
After Evelyn's sudden and untimely death - she was 53 - in 1960, most of the 800-odd artworks left in her studio were consigned to the care of her Dunbar siblings. Her husband, Roger Folley, kept several pieces back, however, and among them was Women Planting Potatoes, an appealing little painting, almost an ikon, measuring a mere 4½ inches square. It had no title, so Roger simply called it Women Planting Potatoes. He kept it for many years before giving it to someone with a special interest in Evelyn's work.
Was this the ploughed field, minus the women and the silent but kindly farmer, across which Evelyn had walked on the morning of January 22nd 1933? (A Sunday, as it happens, so it would have been unlikely that the women were working.) It seems reasonable to assume that Women Planting Potatoes is contemporary with Hercules and the Waggoner. It's as instructive to see Dunbar's procedure in the deployment of these images as it is disappointing to know that Hercules and the Waggoner was never used.
I am very grateful to Neil Wells for his contribution to this essay.
Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2021
by Christopher Campbell-Howes
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