The Cedars and its Garden Part 2 (1924-46)

 Florence Dunbar in the Garden at The Cedars c.1938 oil on canvas Photograph: ©LissLlewellyn Private collection

The Dunbar family moved into The Cedars, a 17-roomed mid-Victorian house in Strood (the westernmost, trans-Medway area of Rochester, Kent) in 1924. I imagine the family was hugely content with William Dunbar's purchase and their new home; beforehand they had lived at 244, High Street, Rochester, a 4-storey house opposite the forecourt of the old Rochester railway station. Not many pictures survive of this house, but first impressions suggest that it was cramped and dark, with a limited garden area.

Here are the Dunbars soon after moving into The Cedars, all except William, who was presumably the photographer.

 The Dunbar family in the garden at The Cedars, 1924. Photo: Dunbar family archive.

Left to right they are: Ronald, the oldest of the siblings; Evelyn, the youngest, who would be 16 the following December; Felbridge, a sort of lurcher; Alec; Florence, their mother; Jessie and finally Marjorie (usually known as 'Midge'), born so close together in 1897/98 as to be almost twins. The family seems to me to express a dynamic of energetic unity, and it's this, for what it's worth, that encourages me to think that this photo was very probably taken on the day they moved into The Cedars...that, and the length and quality of the grass. Florence, a gardener to her green fingertips, would in normal circumstances never have allowed a lawn to grow to such a length, nor to have so many alien plants colonising it.

A background feature of this family photograph is the brick wall, which features in so many of Evelyn's garden images. Here's one of them:

Herbaceous Border at The Cedars c.1934 pen and wash on paper. Signed 'E.Dunbar'. Photograph ©LissLlewellyn (The date, c.1934, may be debatable: the garden path has not yet received its diagonally-laid brick edging. 1926 might be a better estimate.)

Here the garden, or that part of it lying against the brick wall, appears to be well established, no doubt due to the efforts of its handmaidens, maybe Evelyn herself in the foreground and Florence, almost hidden by the greenery just slightly right of centre in the middle ground. The diagonally-laid brick edging evident in later images was probably the work of a rather shadowy pair of gardeners, Alf and/or Bert. 

Alf and Bert: from letter to Charles Mahoney ('Darling Matey'), 20th October 1936. Tate Archive: ©Estate of Evelyn Dunbar

Which was Alf and which was Bert we shall probably never know, and we can only guess at the significance of the marionette strings. One, surnamed Clarke, was a fixture when William Dunbar bought The Cedars. In another letter to Mahoney, dated March 1936, Evelyn wrote '[...] we have another man in the garden to do an 8-hour day on Saturdays [...] He has been very highly recommended & is quite young and strong.' Pausing to note some Evelynish touches, the small change of her esprit, like the patches on Clarke's knees and the spotted handkerchief peeping out of his jacket pocket, we can perhaps assume that Alf and Bert occupied themselves mostly with the fruit and vegetables while Florence, and occasionally her daughters, looked after the ornamental garden.

Florence Dunbar was really the guiding spirit in the development of The Cedars garden. Here - for reference - she is again, as painted by Evelyn, waiting for spring to happen:

Florence Dunbar in the Garden at The Cedars c.1938 oil on canvas Photograph: ©LissLlewellyn Private collection    

It's a cold day in March or April. The first daffodils are flowering, more will follow. Beyond Florence, well wrapped under a plaid blanket and wearing her preferred gardening jacket, some beds of bare earth await her attentions. It's as though she can't wait to get started. Her vigil is shared by what is at first sight an inexplicable black lump in the left foreground, but which on closer examination turns out to be Paul, the Dunbar's Aberdeen terrier, the successor to Felbridge. 

Under the green-fingered Florence's guidance The Cedars garden quickly became Evelyn's abiding source of inspiration. For her it became a metaphor for the Bible-specified interaction between mankind and creator, a notion encapsulated in the story of the Garden of Eden. This garden concept fitted comfortably with Evelyn's - and her mother's - Christian Science, and continued to do so, greatly amplified, with the onset of World War 2; her employment as a war artist recording the agricultural work of the Women's Land Army extended her horizons far beyond an obscure garden in north Kent.

As if in tribute to Florence's influence, Evelyn includes her mother in several of her garden paintings.

 

The Garden at The Cedars oil on canvas c.1938 Photograph ©LissLlewellyn. Private collection

The Garden at The Cedars might also be the continuation of Florence Dunbar in the Garden at The Cedars, indeed it might record the very next day. Spring has sprung, Florence has abandoned her plaid for her fork, and is getting on with her devotions. We see her again on the extreme right in The Shed, in early summer mode.

The Shed oil on canvas c.1937. Private collection

And we find her again in Apple Blossom at The Cedars, still on the extreme right, still busy. (Follow the link for a fuller discussion.)

 

Apple Blossom at The Cedars c.1939 Photograph Bert Janssen ©Christopher Campbell-Howes. Private collection.

The most extensive of Evelyn's garden images is surely Winter Garden. The orientation is such that she might have painted it sitting in the open doorway of The Shed. Everything is there - the buttressed brick wall, the diagonally-laid brick path-edgings, the neatly trimmed lawn, the apple trees and of course The Cedars with its tower in the distance. No human figures, though. All gardens have their own personality, not necessarily reflecting the people who created them. Maybe Evelyn's rendering of The Cedars garden captures its own personality, rather than that of the dedicated people who dressed it and kept it. 

Winter Garden 1927-38. Signed 'Evelyn Dunbar'. Purchased by the Tate from the artist in 1939. Photograph ©Tate, London 2016

 

And just as well.  These images are the only records we have of it. The Cedars garden has disappeared. William Dunbar died in 1932, Alec Dunbar left home in 1936, Florence died in 1944. Evelyn left in 1945, to set up their first married home with her husband Roger Folley in Warwickshire. By the end of 1946 there was no longer a Dunbar presence at The Cedars; Ronald, Jessie and Marjorie had moved to a smaller property, The White House, in Frindsbury, a suburb of Strood. The Cedars was sold, and for a while became a hotel. In due course the garden ground was laid to rest beneath the foundations, drains and infrastructure of an overcrowded housing estate. The garden lives on only through Evelyn's images of it.

Warmest thanks to Paul Liss and Sarah Hill for their contributions.

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2022.

 

Further reading...

EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING
by Christopher Campbell-Howes

is available to order online from:

orders@scriptps.co.uk

 
448 pages, 301 illustrations. RRP £30

Some self-portraits, 1922-1958

Self-portrait 1958 Oil on canvas (1'8" x 12": 49.5 x 29.4cm) Photograph: Petra van der Wal ©Christopher Campbell-Howes. Private collection.

There's often a slight mystery about artists' self-portraits. Something undefinable, something not quite right about the sitter, especially if you've known him or her personally. It may take a little time before it clicks, like an optical illusion falling into place. In Evelyn's case above, painted when she was a little over 50, she has dressed maybe a little less informally than she would have done for a day to be spent in her studio, but all the same there's something not quite faithful to her image. For one thing, the balance and ensemble of her facial features - no one's face is exactly symmetrical - has been changed. Nor was she left-handed. The explanation is simple. Evelyn is painting what she sees in the full length mirror she has brought into her studio. Left and right are reversed.

 

Evelyn is in her new studio. In the autumn of 1958 she and her husband Dr Roger Folley moved into Staple Farm, a farmhouse on the west-facing slopes of the North Downs near Hastingleigh, a village some miles south of Canterbury. She has not long moved in. There have been alterations, among them the addition of an upstairs studio, the first more than makeshift studio she has had since 1945. (How ironic that she should have only 18 months to enjoy it: she died in May 1960.) In a sense she is christening her studio with a self-portrait, the first for many years. In her youth she made several, but she lost the habit after leaving the Royal College of Art in 1933.

 

As always composition is paramount. Her image is based on an isosceles triangle which rises from a slew of legs - nine altogether, hers, the stool's and the easel's - to direct us to the head and the eye and the imagination of this remarkable artist.

 

Evelyn's first known self-portrait, with the same mirror-image reversal, dates from 1922, when she was 15. Here, among her palette and easel, she is maybe dreaming of her future as an artist. Her hand is extraordinarily assured for a 15-year-old.

Self-portrait 1922 Pencil. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Evelyn was in her late teens when she produced a self-portrait in a different vein:

'Girl with banjo': self-portrait playing the banjolele c.1925 Water-colour and charcoal Photograph ©Christopher Campbell-Howes. Private collection.

This probably refers to the housewarming party the Dunbar family gave to celebrate William Dunbar's (Evelyn's father) purchase of The Cedars, the family house in Strood. Two at least of the five Dunbar siblings played in a band for the occasion, Evelyn on banjolele (a cross between banjo and ukulele) and her older sister Marjorie on piano. Studies survive of several other band members, including a violinist and a concertina player. Here is Evelyn, who had a wide repertoire of the dance tunes and popular songs of the day, in full exuberance with the Charleston or Foxtrot or the Black Bottom, complete with period kiss curl. What fun.

At 21 she produced one of the very few female nude self-portraits in the history of art. At the time she was casting about for an art college to suit her, having had one or two false starts and subsequent drop-outs in Rochester and Chelsea. In 1929 she won an exhibition to the Royal College of Art, but it's unlikely that she submitted this self-portrait as part of her entry application portfolio.

Nude self-portrait Pencil and water-colour 1928 Inscribed 'May June/28' Photograph: Petra van der Wal © Liss LlewellynFine Art. Private collection.

We assume that this delicate water-colour is indeed a self-portrait because the inscription is in Evelyn's handwriting at that period, because she kept it all her life and because the provenance is impeccable. The modest rondeurs and texture of the buttocks are echoed in several mid-1930s letters to her fellow-artist and lover Charles Mahoney, who - hardly the first to do so - compared this feature to a peach, and vice versa. It came to light in a portfolio of other juvenilia - she was 21, nevertheless - in 2013, bundled up separately from the substantial quantity of Royal College of Art life school studies from a year or two later. Why did she paint it? In the summer of 1928 she was living at home, writing and illustrating children's books, not having found much satisfaction in the art college courses she had abandoned. In the absence of life classes, and maybe conscious of the louche reputation sometimes attaching itself to models, did Evelyn try to explore one of the great imperatives of figure drawing unofficially, in the comfort of her own bedroom? Perhaps we should ask no further questions, but simply enjoy this delicate water-colour essay into the nude with the subtly tinted flesh of an attractive 21-year-old woman.

Self portrait, c.1927 oil on canvas board. Photograph ©Liss Llewellyn

Here is Evelyn in her early 20s, at her easel, carefully observing herself in a mirror. Her floppy hat adds a hint of Bohemian style to her otherwise earnest expression. As the artist Tom Phillips noted, 'If self-portraits have a tendency to look glum it should not be surprising. As Rembrandt discovered, it is difficult to laugh and paint at the same time: the laugh or smile is acted and the eyes fail to join in, being themselves otherwise engaged.' As mentioned above the other dilemma is (since a mirror in usually involved) that the image an artist makes is the wrong way round.

 

Finally, from 1930 comes this rather severe self-portrait, in all probability submitted to her Royal College of Art tutors as part of a mid-course portfolio. Evelyn has grown up.

'Self Portrait Drawing' Watercolour, damaged with orange/brown stain. ?1930 (22" x 15": 56 x 38cm) Photograph: ©Christopher Campbell-Howes. Private collection.  

Many thanks to Paul Liss for his contribution to this essay.

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2022

Further reading...

EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING
by Christopher Campbell-Howes

is available to order online from:

orders@scriptps.co.uk

448 pages, 301 illustrations. RRP £30