The Garden Oil on millboard c.1926 21 x 32.6 cm Museums Sheffield
It's uncertain when The Garden was painted, nor can we be sure this was the title Evelyn originally gave it. It's one of a pair. Let's start with the pair; it's the same house, but the façade instead of the side. Both measure approximately the same.
Several years ago, during researches in preparation for Evelyn Dunbar: A Life in Painting, I was invited to East Sussex to look at a small collection of Evelyn's work, as fascinating as it was unassuming; a wonderful privilege for the biographer. Among the various paintings and drawings, mostly from Evelyn's late teens and early 20s, was this:
We stopped in the centre of Ticehurst. We showed our photo to shopkeepers and people in the Post Office: no one recognised it. Yes, they said, there had once been a house called Steellands, but it was now called Apsley Court, a red brick building, nothing like the picture. Oh yes, and there was a road called Steellands Rise on the village outskirts. So at least the name lived on. Meagre pickings. We retreated into Kent, mystery unsolved. We'd drawn a blank. Back to square 1.
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In 1924 the Dunbars left a rather cramped house opposite the old station forecourt in Rochester and moved west across the river Medway to Strood, where Evelyn's father William had bought The Cedars, a much larger house with a 2½ acre garden, fully wandered through here. The Cedars lay about a half-mile up London Road from the centre of Strood. (It's still there, its pyramidical tower - once Evelyn's studio - overlooking the press of newer housing.) A mile or two up the hill was - and is - the settlement of Gadshill. Charles Dickens lived at Gadshill Place for the last 15 years of his life, 1855-70, and not far away is Gads Hill House. (Both forms, Gadshill and Gads Hill, appear to be acceptable.)
We don't know who lived at Gads Hill House a century ago, but fully conscious of the shifting sands and slippery slopes of conjecture, perhaps we can posit that Evelyn, the most outgoing of the Dunbars, got to know them, maybe through a Rochester Girls' Grammar School friend, of whom we have an unwitting but distant image, because the mystery house is surely none other than Gads Hill House -
In 1929 Evelyn started studying at the Royal College of Art, to which she had won an exhibition. The complement of the full fees was paid by her father William and her uncle Stead Cowling. Initially she travelled daily to Kensington from Strood by train, but tiring of this a few months into her course, she looked for lodgings. She found them in Hampstead, firstly in the ambit of Allan Gwynne-Jones, one of her RCA tutors, and then with Noël Carrington, publisher and book designer, in South End Road, from whom a little later she rented a studio. A near neighbour was the not-yet-knighted William Rothenstein, the RCA principal, who presided over a salon frequented by the great and good of English art, while his nephew Oliver Simon's table at Downshire Hill welcomed artists, especially of the younger generation. This Hampstead coterie, which occasionally rubbed shoulders with Bloomsbury, formed what the art historian and critic Herbert Read called 'a nest of gentle artists'. In the years 1930-32 Evelyn fitted into this world of good company and creative cross-fertilisation very comfortably indeed. A young woman gifted in the arts of friendship, she made lifelong friends in Hampstead. It might be wondered how this student contrived to sit at the high table, as it were. Perhaps it should be remembered that in a sense Evelyn was a mature student, four years older than most of the school leavers of her intake year, and much the same age as some of the young bloods like Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, whom Rothenstein had appointed to the RCA to ginger his staff up a little.
Evelyn's position in this nest of gentle artists was disturbed by the beginning of her association with Charles Mahoney, her mural tutor in her fourth and post-graduate year. (His birthname was Cyril, but he became almost universally known as Charles or Charley after his RCA colleague Barnett Freedman re-christened him, probably for the rhythm and euphony of 'Charlie Mahoney' and the agreeable rhymes that could be conjured out if it.)
With Rothenstein's enthusiastic backing Evelyn volunteered to join a team of recent graduates, led by Mahoney, to implement a mural decoration scheme at Brockley County School for Boys, in south-east London. Almost from the beginning of this project Evelyn and Mahoney fell in love. Predictably, her devotion both to her work and to Mahoney reduced her Hampstead presence. Besides having a reputation for being touchy and difficult, although a competent tutor, politically Mahoney leaned far to the left, not a marked characteristic of the nest of gentle artists.
The Brockley scheme lasted three years, 1933-36, during which both her father and her uncle Stead Cowling died, and with them their subsidies. Brockley imprisoned Evelyn to a large extent: during this period she painted very little else. The Brockley remuneration was uncertain and irregular. Part way through Mahoney left - after all, he had his own RCA job to do - and Evelyn was to some extent trapped in a scheme which she herself had greatly enlarged from its original dimensions. She and Mahoney separated in the late summer of 1937. She had no money, no prospects, and she felt excluded from Mahoney's circle of friends. So began what she later called her 'crisis' years.
* * *
Hampstead and the gentle nest came to the rescue. Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, in 1936 Rothenstein arranged for the purchase of Girl and a Birdcage (c.1924) and some of Evelyn's Brockley sketches by the Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle, recommending Evelyn as an artist of 'real genius'. Noël Carrington, once Evelyn's Hampstead landlord, arranged several commissions for book illustration, which led subsequently in 1937 to Gardeners' Choice, written and illustrated jointly by Evelyn and Mahoney, in which, curiously, this drawing appears as a vignette:
John Rothenstein, William's son, director of the Sheffield City art gallery, asked Evelyn to select a painting from her studio for his gallery to purchase. This maybe put her in a tight spot: the previous years had been spent up ladders and on trestles at Brockley; she had painted very little lately in the way of formal canvases. I can imagine her leafing through the canvases piled in her studio at The Cedars, almost all from her pre-student days. We come full circle: what she chose was The Garden, which now hangs in Sheffield, a witness maybe less to Evelyn's talent as to the kindness - indeed, to the rescue operation - of her Hampstead friends. Was there collusion? We shall never know.
This benevolence was in evidence a little later. In 1939 Evelyn's first year RCA tutor, Allan Gwynne-Jones, persuaded the Tate to buy two of her canvases via the Knapping Fund, a fund for the purchase of work by living or recently dead artists. Again they come from early days, Sketch for Decoration: Flight and the very fine Winter Garden, which heads this blog. Although it exists elsewhere, there is no evidence of Mahoney in any of these works.
Finally, in late 1939, Sir William Rothenstein (by now knighted) suggested to Evelyn that she should apply to the War Artists' Advisory Committee for consideration as a war artist. She did so, and a few months later was appointed. She never looked back. At the time of Rothenstein's suggestion, Evelyn had been at her lowest ebb, working behind the counter in her sisters' Rochester haberdashery shop. Her 'crisis' years were over. She was back in The Garden, the agricultural garden of wartime Britain.
Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2022.
by Christopher Campbell-Howes
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