Double vision: Wye from Olantigh (1952-3)

 Wye from Olantigh (autumn) Oil on canvas ?1952 Private collection

Olantigh (pronounced Òll-en-ti), a name as ancient as any in East Kent, is a settlement about a mile north of the village of Wye consisting of a few cottages, a large country house and the surrounding parkland.

Evelyn and her husband Roger Folley left Oxford and moved to Kent in 1950. Roger Folley had recently been appointed as a lecturer in horticultural economics at Wye College, the agricultural campus of Imperial College, London. It was a big step up for him, but Evelyn deeply regretted leaving Oxford, her teaching posts at the Oxford School of Art and the Ruskin School and the artistic coterie she delighted in and whose influence contributed to the most fertile and expressive period of her life.

They rented The Elms, an isolated house on the edge of Hinxhill, a tiny satellite of Ashford, in Kent. With time on her hands Evelyn set out from The Elms to explore the neighbourhood, sometimes in their Morris Oxford Traveller, when easels, paints and brushes had to be carried, sometimes on her bicycle, sometimes on foot when all that needed to be carried were sketch pads and charcoal. Landscape began to preoccupy her to an extent she hadn't known before. The landscapes from the last few years of her life outnumber the combined total from her earlier periods.

At some stage in the early 1950s Evelyn's exploration of the countryside surrounding Wye and The Elms took her to Olantigh Park. One glance, surely, between those repoussoir trees, with Wye church rising above the intervening woodland (and - though hardly visible here - the distant tower on the horizon of St Mary the Virgin in Ashford, done with the minutest of brushes) - one glance to suggest to Evelyn that here was a landscape modest in its sweep, at once intimate and universal, the hand of man equally evident with the hand of the creator, with or without a capital C. In fact a 'landscape worked and loved in equal measure', to quote a message I once discovered embedded in a wall in the Outer Hebrides, about as far as one can get within the British Isles from East Kent, but which I thought admirably summed up what Evelyn looked for in a landscape.

I'm inclined to think Wye from Olantigh (above) dates from the autumn of 1952, only because, and for lack of other evidence, Evelyn mounted a solo exhibition, the only one of her career, in Wye in December 1953. Had the painting above been shown, the paint would hardly have been dry. More reasonable, in this context, to assign it to the autumn of 1952. Perhaps it doesn't matter very much. There are more interesting questions to mull over, like which came first, because...

...there are two accounts of Wye from Olantigh. Here is the pair:

Wye from Olantigh (summer) Oil on canvas 1953 Private collection

This version was the subject of a fairly full essay here. It came as a very pleasant surprise to learn that Evelyn had painted two versions of the same scene. The summer version has been in the same family since 1960, the autumn version similarly but unknown to me until recently. It is as though these beatific visions of English landscape keep pace with our age.

Many thanks to Anne Skilbeck for her assistance.

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2022. All rights reserved.

 

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

Women's Auxiliary Air Force Store (1944)

 

 

 Women's Auxiliary Air Force Store 1944 Oil on canvas (1' 4" x 1' 8": 40.6 x 50.8 cm) Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

In the summer of 1944, while Allied troops were fighting furiously to drive the Germans out of Normandy, Evelyn spent some weeks carrying out a commission by her employers, the War Artists' Advisory Committee, to record the activities of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). Perhaps with some intervention from her RAF officer husband Roger Folley, then serving with 488 (NZ) Squadron at RAF Colerne, in Wiltshire, she set up her easel at nearby RAF South Cerney. Her visit was not a success. Despite the WAAF being popularly, and proudly, presented as working on equal terms (apart from combat) with the men of the RAF, she was barred from access to operational areas. Her experience was thus restricted to observing and recording ancillary activity centres, the canteen, the sick bay and - as here - the clothing store. Neverthless it was here that she found, or was directed towards, something quite extraordinary, something unexpectedly potent in her promotion of women's interests and improvement of their status.

 

* * *

Evelyn has taken her stepladder to give a top-down view of a WAAF clothing store. The central figure is especially interesting. Her single-strip epaulette slide shows she holds a commissioned WAAAF (three As, please note) rank, that of Section Officer, while her shoulder flash reads, unexpectedly, AUSTRALIA. What is she doing here, on the other side of the world from her home, in a clothing store?

 

 Women's Auxiliary Air Force Store: Detail showing 'AUSTRALIA' shoulder flash

 

She would have volunteered for the WAAAF, possibly in response to the threat from Japan, some time after March 1941. The WAAAF training centre in Melbourne, to which she would have been posted, instructed aircraft maintenance staff, munitions workers, electricians, telegraphists, radar operatives and staff in many other areas requiring high levels of technical and scientific skill. She would have been paid at least one third less than RAAF male staff in equivalent positions.We don't know in what technical or scientific skill our WAAAF officer has been trained, but it's unlikely to have been the supervision of a clothing store in southern England. As far as is known, she is the only Australian WAAAF officer to have been painted by a British war artist. We don't know who she was.

 

Let's look more closely at this clothing store. It has an air of desperation about it, as though the clothing store at RAF South Cerney was the only place in which a married, female civilian artist with slightly bohemian leanings might safely be let loose.

 

It's a gloomy, prison-like place. It's not certain where the light comes from; certainly not from the tiny windows set high in the walls. Maybe we have one of Evelyn's visual puns, a particularly powerful one: the light comes from Evelyn herself, from the direction in which she, the artist, is casting light - as we shall see in a moment - on a contentious problem most keenly evident in a clothing store. 

 

There are three theatres of action: on the extreme centre left a WAAF is trying on a tunic that appears to be too large for her. She bears some resemblance to a WAAF whose portrait Evelyn painted while at RAF South Cerney, entitling it Portrait of an Airwoman, which now hangs in the RAF Museum, Hendon. It's not the best portrait she ever painted, but perhaps in this also Evelyn was making a point: her tunic is just as lumpy as in the clothing store picture (if indeed she is the subject), we can be happy for her Airwoman that her rosebud lips pass muster and that her engagement ring points to a brighter future, but that forearm chevron, denoting Good Conduct...well, we are not very far from Brownie badges and certain top-down attitudes that did not exist in the parent service, the all-male RAF.

 

Portrait of an Airwoman 1944 RAF Museum, Hendon

 

The second theatre of action concentrates on the extreme right, where a trousered figure, maybe indicating a change of attitudes to women's wear at institutional level, is poking disconsolately at discarded clothing which World War 2 RAF uniform buffs may be better able to identify than I, though similarly baffled by the pink strips.

We're led into the third and principal theatre of action by one of Evelyn's SW-NE diagonals, in this case a queue of WAAFs. The queue leader, whose neckwear is ambiguous, is pointing very obviously at the collar of her blouse or shirt, while the Australian Section Officer looks on rather blankly. 

 

As well she might. She is dealing with a recurring problem, legendary at the time among British WAAFs; that Evelyn has chosen to paint it is authentication in itself. The pale blue uniform shirts, to which separate collars were attached by means of studs, were cut to men's sizes and shapes. This meant that a shirt with a chest measurement generous enough to accommodate WAAF busts had a collar measurement correspondingly larger than the female neck it was supposed to enclose, so that it was impossible to do up the black uniform necktie without leaving an ugly and draughty gap between throat and collar stud. To combat this unthinking chauvinism many WAAFs preferred to buy their own blouses privately, trusting to a colour match acceptable to Section Officers and suchlike. We are not told how our Australian dealt with the problem. It's enough that we should be made aware of it.

Evelyn didn't enjoy her time at RAF South Cerney. She complained to E.C.Gregory, then secretary of the War Artists' Advisory Committee, that despite official security clearance she wasn't allowed to record WAAF activities in operational areas. This restricted her activities to such an extent that her only output from the time she spent at RAF South Cerney was Women's Auxiliary Air Force Store and several portraits of WAAFs and nurses associated with the RAF. 

 

I think Evelyn felt diffident about this picture. Maybe signing it 'E.D.' instead of her usual 'Evelyn Dunbar' points to this uncertainty. The problem over gender-sizing, prevalent in the earlier 1940s, had largely gone away by the time she finished painting it. With a non-existent problem to highlight the picture had lost its point and its impact. In fact Women's Auxiliary Air Force Store was the last of Evelyn's war paintings to be submitted: painted in the early autumn of 1944, it was not handed in until January 1946. But she hasn't wasted her time: of all her wartime images (except perhaps A Land Girl and the Bail Bull) Women's Auxiliary Air Force Store carries the strongest messages of the inferior status of women. 

With thanks to Penny Summerfield for her contribution.

(Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2022. All rights reserved.)

 

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

Why is the dresser wearing trousers? (1940)

Putting on Anti-gas Protective Clothing 1940 Imperial War Museum, London

We've seen this before, the first of Evelyn's war paintings, looked at in some detail here. That commentary wasn't entirely exhaustive, however, because there was one element that I didn't explore: the first indication that I think Evelyn gave of a deep and significant personal message evident in some of her war painting. It's in this context that I want to look more closely at the secondary figure in Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing, that of the dresser. But first, a glance behind the scenes.

* * *

Two days after her 33rd birthday, in December 1939, Evelyn applied to be considered for appointment as a war artist at the suggestion of Sir William Rothenstein, former Principal of the Royal College of Art. Rothenstein had been impressed with Evelyn's gifts and promise since she started studying at the RCA in 1929. Known for looking after his former students, he remained on friendly terms with Evelyn until his death in 1945; he's likely to have been a smiling presence in the wings when her candidature came up for discussion by the War Artists' Advisory Committee (WAAC) in the early months of 1940.

The 11-strong, all male WAAC, whose average age in 1940 was just under 60, can't have known very much about Evelyn. The chairman, Kenneth Clark, had come across her work once (but scroll down), and had hardly warmed to it. Percy Jowett, current RCA Principal and another WAAC member, to whom Evelyn applied, appeared to know of her work: on her application letter he wrote '...a very fine artist who has done excellent decorations as well as drawings', a perceptive and welcome commendation without being particularly illuminating.

For the WAAC the months between Evelyn's application and her acceptance (and that of Dorothy Coke and Ethel Gabain, together with Evelyn the first women war artists to be appointed) were marked by a certain non-commitment in coming to terms with the employment of women artists. Pressure on the WAAC to do so came notably from Lady Florence Norman, a founder trustee of the Imperial War Museum. For Evelyn those months, December 1939 - April 1940, were rather different.

* * *

168, High Street, Rochester, in a later incarnation, c.1952. The first floor windows illuminated Evelyn's The Blue Gallery.

 On the floor above The Fancy Shop, her sisters' haberdashery shop at 168 High Street, Rochester, was a large, handsome, blue-panelled room running the frontage length of the shop below. A year earlier, in February 1939, Evelyn opened what she called The Blue Gallery in this room with an exhibition of local artists' work together with work by leading contemporary artists of the time, some now better known than others: Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman, Allan Gwynne-Jones, Kenneth Rowntree...and Charles Mahoney.

That Mahoney was asked to contribute was perhaps typical of Evelyn's generosity of spirit. He and Evelyn had had a disastrous relationship, one that in terms of her career brought few benefits. In 1932-33, her postgraduate year at the RCA, Mahoney had been her mural tutor, partly as a result of which she volunteered to join his team to decorate Brockley School for Boys (now Prendergast - Hilly Fields School) in south-east London. To start with no one else volunteered. Maybe it was hardly surprising: remuneration was suspiciously vague, and the locus being a school the viewing public would be limited to pupils and staff. Nor could the finished work go on display elsewhere. For young artists at the start of their careers it was a dead end. However late in 1933 two other recent graduates joined in for a limited period, and discovered that in the meantime Evelyn and Mahoney had fallen in love. 

However promising at first, their relationship was blighted by each having very different characters and backgrounds, Evelyn a cheerfully committed Christian Scientist from a bourgeois merchant background, Mahoney a disputatious atheist leaning far to the left politically. Both however shared a deep love of plants and gardening. Evelyn's self-effacing attempts to form a personal and professional unity with Mahoney failed, all except one: their joint production, Gardeners' Choice. They separated in 1937. A miscarriage marked the end of their relationship. Evelyn retreated to the bosom of her family. Her commitment to Mahoney, which included burying herself in the obscurity of Brockley for three years, had hardly enabled her career to get into second gear. 

Evelyn's return to The Cedars led her to think of herself as a cuckoo in the family nest. She refers to herself as such in the autobiographical April of 1938. Kindly people though the Dunbars were, there were certain understandable tensions within the family: her siblings had left school years before - the eldest, Ronald, had fought through World War 1 in a kilted regiment - and had since become hard-working shopkeepers and entrepreneurs, all contributing to the household expenses; Evelyn had had some 7 years'-worth of further education, with nothing material to show for it. And no money. April is the earliest of a short series of boxed images, as though Evelyn wanted to build protective walls round herself. Joseph's Dream of 1938 is another. To ease family tensions she agreed to work behind the counter in her sisters' shop, selling ribbons and buttons and contributing to occasional window displays. Her final effort to restore her career as an artist was The Blue Gallery. It was a dismal failure. It closed two months later without a single work having been sold. Well might Evelyn call this period her 'crisis' years. She returned to the haberdashery counter. Upstairs The Blue Gallery remained unvisited, except by Evelyn herself, who occasionally used it as a studio. It may well be that during the next few years some of her war paintings were produced there.

Her appointment as a war artist was met with delight, relief and determination to give the best value for money. The letters held in the Imperial War Museum to Ted Dickey, the WAAC secretary, in this context are deferential, almost servile. For the moment she had no money at all and had to apply to Dickey for an advance for travel and materials to undertake her first commission. For this she had to travel to Marlow, in Buckinghamshire, where at Bisham Abbey there was a training centre given over to the Women's Voluntary Service, at that time given some Civil Defence responsibility for organising anti-gas precautions.

* * *

Why is Evelyn's dresser wearing trousers?

No identities are given to the two women in Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing (which, maybe significantly, continues the boxed presentation which marks some of her work during her 'crisis' years). The dresser is very simply drawn. By box 4, however, we notice something curious, presumably included deliberately by Evelyn: she is wearing the colours, slightly muted, of the Union Jack. She stands for the women of Britain, about to be protected by the dressee. The simplicity of her dress contrasts strongly with the ferociously awkward folds and creases she is helping the anti-gas nurse or ambulance driver to get into. The dresser is wearing trousers, which she probably called slacks, and this is really quite surprising, because even in 1940 it was far from universal for women to wear trousers. Indeed the wearing of them was widely mocked and disparaged.

In the 9-frame set of preparatory sketches below for Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing the dresser is wearing some kind of dress or overall. Certainly not slacks. Why has Evelyn changed her mind? 

Sketch for Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing (detail) Pencil 1940 Photograph ©LissLlewellyn

 

By the late 1930s the wearing of trousers tended to be limited to younger middle class women, as leisure wear primarily. It's perhaps noteworthy that the women's fashion magazine Vogue first featured slacks in 1939. As a random sample record, the wartime diarist Nella Last noted the trend and what it might indicate: a little later she wrote 'I suddenly thought tonight, "I know why a lot of women have gone into pants [i.e. slacks, trousers] - it's a sign that they are asserting themselves in some way." I feel pants are more a sign of the times than I realised.' So is Evelyn's maybe last-minute presentation of her slacks-wearing dresser intentional or unintentional?

Evelyn herself frequently wore slacks, although her slacks-wearing iconography is meagre:

 

 

Here she is posing for The Morning Post (later incorporated in The Daily Telegraph) in February 1936, standing on a scaffold pretending to paint a Brockley Mural image completed three years earlier...

 

...and here she is again in the persona of a mouse (she frequently did this as a young woman) in a June 1933 letter to Mahoney. Dressed in painting smock and slacks she is carrying plans for an extension of the Brockley Mural scheme.  (Detail from a letter held in the Tate Archive.)

This is not for one moment intended to suggest that the slack-wearing, ever-modest Evelyn brazenly styled herself as the dresser in Putting on Anti-gas Protective Clothing - far from it; she had only been in post a few weeks - but that she had come up with something much more subtly powerful: through her image of the unobtrusive dresser she had enlisted into the national effort that entire cohort of younger women to which she herself belonged. No mean feat for her first commission as a war artist.

 

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2022. All rights reserved.

   

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