Opportunity 1936 Oil on canvas 61 x 61cm (24 x 24in), diameter 53.3cm (21in)
Photograph: ©Bonhams, by kind permission. Private collection
In late 1932 Evelyn, then a postgraduate student at the Royal College of
Art, was invited by her mural tutor Charles Mahoney to join him and other recent
graduates to paint a series of murals at Brockley County School for Boys (now
Prendergast-Hilly Fields School) in Lewisham. Evelyn jumped at the opportunity
of such a commission at the start of her career. Although the question of
remuneration was suspiciously vague, it would mean working on extensive
surfaces, a challenge she found very exciting. It would also mean working
alongside Mahoney, three years her senior and a man she had grown to like and
admire. (To avoid any confusion, perhaps I should point out that Mahoney's given name was Cyril, but that his RCA colleague Barnett Freedman re-christened him Charles or Charlie, probably because of the rhythmic euphony of 'Charlie Mahoney' and the possibility of engaging rhymes that this might give rise to.)
Work started in the summer of 1933. Only two other team members could be
found, Violet Martin and Mildred 'Elsi' Eldridge, who worked for a few weeks in early 1934. Otherwise Evelyn and
Mahoney worked alone, quickly forming a close relationship, professional and
personal. The project was initially restricted to the school hall, but on Evelyn's
cheerful initiative it grew to include the adjoining arcade and its ceiling. We can
imagine that in due course Mahoney, whose project it was, felt sidelined;
compromised, too, by Evelyn's demands for a closer union, often expressed in illustrated letters. Some examples are given below. Mahoney abandoned the project in May 1935. His
final contribution, after two hall panels and some lesser work, was the grisaille
decoration surrounding the ceiling roundels Evelyn was due to complete.
Evelyn
worked on alone, her sequence of 22 smaller arcade panels, ostensibly illustrating fables, wise saws and modern instances but also veiling hints of an
increasingly fractured relationship. She did her best to maintain her convictions,
repeatedly suggesting to Mahoney what professional and personal opportunities
lay before them if they worked and lived as a couple. The first hint of the theme of 'opportunity' comes in a letter to Mahoney written in October, 1935:
Extract from a letter to Mahoney, October 3rd 1935. Tate Archive ©Estate of Evelyn Dunbar
Despite Mahoney having left the Brockley mural project 4 months earlier, which is not to say that he took no further interest in it, Evelyn is still exploring the idea that they might continue to work together.
The notion that opportunity could be personified, made into a figure with some resemblance to herself and accoutred with symbolic ladders, comes the following year. A climbing plant has grown to the top of the left-hand ladder, implying she has been holding it up for some time:
Extract from a letter to Mahoney, 6th April 1936. Tate Archive ©Estate of Evelyn Dunbar
No children - yet. They make their first appearance the following September in another letter to Mahoney, perhaps in greater number than Evelyn envisaged as a practical or indeed physical possibility. 'I think I could do a better one', she writes in the letter reproduced above, and indeed the draughtsmanship in the letter below is superb:
Extract from a letter to Mahoney, September 1936. Tate Archive ©Estate of Evelyn Dunbar
How tempted Mahoney may have been to cave in to Evelyn's urgings we don't know, however enjoyable he found the nimbus of putti scrumping the fruit from Opportunity's hat.
Mahoney was not to be beguiled, and said so: children would stunt their individual
careers. Opportunity, given a greater permanence in oils, as reproduced at the top of this essay, was Evelyn's final version. It would have been on her easel as the September letter above was being written. Evelyn's campaign came to nothing. After a miscarriage she and Mahoney separated in 1937. Apart from the Brockley murals, the only offspring from their collaboration was the jointly written and illustrated Gardeners' Choice, a fairly revolutionary gardening book for its time, which appeared in late 1937, shortly after the authors' separation.
Like much of Evelyn's work, Opportunity is a strongly coded personal statement.
The roundel form echoes the latest image on which Evelyn and Mahoney worked
together at Brockley. The sunflower in Opportunity's splendid hat refers to
Mahoney's obsession with sunflowers, and thus targets him directly. Ladders
occasionally feature elsewhere in Evelyn's work. Almost invariably the top is somewhere
undefined, outside the frame. Not so here: uniquely, we are allowed - just - to see
the top, and maybe Evelyn has realised, with a heavy heart, that the opportunities
she envisaged were not limitless.
Opportunity was shown at the New English Art Club 1936
winter exhibition, where it sold for 15 guineas. It was bought by Harold Jeppe, a remarkable South African
Olympian athlete, businessman and art patron, who later became a director of the
Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.
* * *
There was a curious aftermath. Evelyn's career was seriously blighted by her separation from Mahoney. It would surely have come, sooner or later: they were poles apart in their beliefs and outlook, Mahoney, like so many artists of his day, leaned well to the left, while Evelyn was a committed Christian Scientist from a merchant family, not without its bourgeois and conservative elements. Apart from her personal distress, she was alienated from the circle of his fellow-artist friends, like his Royal College of Art colleagues and the Great Bardfield group of artists (they sometimes overlapped) with whom she had enjoyed warm friendships in Mahoney's company for several years. She withdrew into the bosom of her family to spend what she called her 'crisis' years, 1938-40. At her lowest ebb, she spent the best part of a year, until her appointment as a war artist, serving behind the counter in her sisters' haberdashery shop on Rochester High Street and painting very little.
Her sisters, Jessie and Marjorie, dealt in the usual range of haberdashery including embroidery wools. Evelyn was asked, or volunteered, to provide the equivalent of a painting-by-numbers canvas background for needlepeople to buy wools for and to work on. To promote sales a finished picture was made for the shop window. Here it is, not a thing of great loveliness, but no doubt it offered opportunities for contented winter evenings with needle and coloured wools by the fireside.
A needlework version of Opportunity, discovered in 2013 and reworked and repaired through the good offices of Paul Liss. Photograph ©LissLlewellyn
Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2021
Would you like to read more?
EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING
by Christopher Campbell-Howes
is available to order online from:
by Christopher Campbell-Howes
is available to order online from:
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448 pages, 301 illustrations. RRP £30
448 pages, 301 illustrations. RRP £30
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