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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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:
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.
by Christopher Campbell-Howes
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