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:
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.
by Christopher Campbell-Howes
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