Sketchbooks (1921-45)

(You might like to turn the sound up before viewing this video)

Last year I had the wonderful privilege of looking at a collection of Evelyn's sketchbooks. There were 21 of them, covering her entire career, although one or two gaps were evident. Apparently they had been stored, unrecognised for what they were, in a cellar, or a damp outhouse or stable for the best part of sixty years. Some pages fell apart at the least touch. Very few were unstained by water infiltration. Rust attacked spiral bindings and staples. Whatever insects or mites feed on damp paper had enjoyed monstrous feasts, followed by multiple egg-layings and subsequent grub exit-holes through several adjacent sheets.

The little video clip above - the voice is mine, the hands are my wife Josephine's - gives a rough idea of the original state of these documents. The foxing and staining takes on a certain beauty of its own, through which Evelyn's drawings struggle to show though. The pages in the video were unconnected and were obviously loosely assembled and thrust into a folder. The girl with eyes closed or downcast comes from 1925, coming up for a hundred years ago. I've no idea who she was. The rough pencil drawing of a building entitled 'Mullion Court' probably comes from about 20 years later: it was a hotel a little to the south of Maidstone, in Kent, which Alec Dunbar, the younger of Evelyn's two brothers, and his wife Jill bought shortly after World War 2.

There are treasures in these sketch books. Students of Evelyn's work can find her working sketches for many well-known canvases. I was able to use several in my account of A Knitting Party. Here is a small selection. Some have bearings on more developed pictures (e.g. Milking at Sparsholt), others are ephemeral and one-off sketches, and - in this selection - one with an idea so powerful that it can be regretted that Evelyn never took it further.

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 Mum and I in a British Home Industry Shop c.1921. Evelyn was possibly 15 at the time of this little water-colour, but already confident with her medium, adept at figure drawing, especially with the folds and hang of clothing, and - curiously - awake to the possibilities of drawing figures from behind. There is no clue to what this is about.

 

 Pomona,c.1945. Named after the Roman demi-goddess of fruits, especially apples, Evelyn conceived the idea of a dancing female figure with a hat laden with fruit as the principal motif for her 1946 Christmas card. Her model was her sister-in-law Joan, my mother. In another Pomona sketch (not in the sketch books) less than careful movement has caused all the fruit to tumble to the ground.

 Rochester Cathedral, June 1929. The Dunbar family lived in Strood, that part of Rochester which lies across the river Medway to the west. It is not known how prominent the cathedral was in Evelyn's life (probably not in the least, given that the family were committed Christian Scientists), but in some senses it was central to the life of Rochester. I included this sketch, foxed and stained though it is, because it's one of the very few architectural drawings from Evelyn's pen. Buildings seldom figure in her output.  

 Fairground at Rochester, c.1924. Travelling shows in Rochester, installing themselves probably on extended rising ground fairly close to the city centre called The Lines, in which there appears to be an outline of the distant cathedral and other buildings in the background.

 Milking at Sparsholt Agricultural Institute, 1940. As a newly-appointed war artist Evelyn was posted to Sparsholt in the summer of 1940. Many of her best-known war paintings featuring the Women's Land Army come from this period. Her technique was to sketch her subject and then to write in pencil, as she has done here, directions for shades of colour and other modifications (e.g. 'bigger' on the cow's rump) to be implemented on her return to her studio in Rochester. The milkmaid is possibly Anne Fountain, who was the subject of a fully worked oil canvas, now lost. We are fortunate to have this account, even though foxed and stained.

 Off to School, c 1925. After leaving Rochester Grammar School for Girls in 1925 Evelyn spent a year at home writing and illustrating children's stories. Some, published by Dean and Son, sold reasonably well. The sketch books have several very carefully worked water-colour sketches of children - as in this example - and incidents for her children's books. It is not known in which of them 'Off to School' features.

 

Phallic Bud, c.1936. I have left this quite extraordinary image, of which several  versions exist elsewhere, until last, because it illustrates Evelyn's state of mind at a time when it appeared that her lover, the artist Charles Mahoney, was not going to commit himself to the partnership, personal and professional, she so ardently wanted. As the possibility waned, she upped the ante, as it were, in various ways, and finally in the possibility of starting a family. Mahoney wasn't interested, and said so: children would blight their individual careers.

 Undeterred, Evelyn sent him drawings suggesting raising a family together. She had already done so once with a series of drawings and paintings called Opportunity. Now, in Phallic Bud (my title) there are hints of Mahoney in the sunflower (upper left), almost his trademark, and the peacocks below, probably a reference to one of Mahoney's contributions to the Brockley Murals. Most significant, however, is that Evelyn and Mahoney were working together, uniquely, in the partnership Evelyn had envisaged, in writing and illustrating Gardeners' Choice, at the time a fairly revolutionary gardening book. Evelyn has contrived, inside a Mahoneyan enclosure, to invent a bud about to burst open with children. It is not recorded what Mahoney thought of this, but they separated as soon as Gardeners' Choice was complete. The separation was so precipitous that a Foreword commissioned from Edward Bawden was lost in its onrush.

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The sketch books were acquired by a subsidiary of Oxford Brookes University, the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History (OCMCH), where at the time of writing they are being prepared for eventual public viewing and study, a huge undertaking. It's very good to be able to report a happy ending and a bright future for what at one time appeared to be a story of surely unintentional neglect.

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2022

 

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