'Maternity buds' (1937)

 

 

 

'Maternity bud' 1937 Pen and ink on cartridge paper Photograph ©LissLlewellyn

In about 1936 Evelyn started, from not much more than a doodle, to design a personal letter format, consisting of a vase, flower pot or stylised flower bed, from which grew two flowered stems up the sides of the paper, between which she wrote her message.

                

 Designs for personal correspondence, c.1936. Image ©LissLlewellyn

 

Letter to Allan Gwynne Jones, 26th February 1937 (?) Private collection

 

The letter reproduced above is one of the very few in this format that survive. Mostly they are uncoloured, but Evelyn has pulled the stops out to congratulate her first-year Royal College of Art tutor, Allan Gwynne Jones, who became a lifelong friend, on his engagement to Rosemary Allan, a fellow artist. She calls him 'Sir', not because he has been knighted (he never was) but out of a friendly respect. 

As often the case with Evelyn, there may be some decoding to do: is there any significance in tulips, carnations and harebells growing out of a three-year old rose stock? Did Allan Gwynne Jones have a walled garden with one door open, the other closed?  One can only wonder, and maybe wonder at the purpose of such an exercise, but clearly it suited her fancy to vary the flowers and the setting to complement the character of her correspondent or the subject of her message.

By late 1936 or early 1937 it appeared to Evelyn that her relationship with Charles Mahoney, a former Royal College of Art tutor and later lover, was coming apart. She had shared with him their major work to date, the extensive murals at Brockley School in south-east London, which were inaugurated in February 1936. The later mural panels hinted at the autumn of their relationship. Nevertheless Evelyn saw her future in partnership with Mahoney, professional as well as personal. 

Evelyn's letters to Mahoney suggest that he needed some encouragement to take part in their only professional joint venture, Gardeners' Choice, published by Routledge in late 1937 and reprinted by Persephone Books in 2015. It's arguable how genuine a joint venture this somewhat forward-looking gardening book was. As for their personal relationship, the same series of letters carries Evelyn's frequent suggestions for gardens they might develop together, houses they might live in together, places they might travel to together. Eventually she made her top call: to cement the union they should have children together. She made this clear in a series of images, mostly in drawings in her letters, but occasionally in more weighty formats, like the canvas entitled Opportunity, closely examined here. Below is the most evolved of the Opportunity images. The reference to Mahoney is at once clear: sunflowers, as seen in Opportunity's hat and at the top of the ladder, and in many of his other paintings, might well be said to be Mahoney's trade-mark.

Opportunity 1936 Oil on canvas 61 x 61cm (24 x 24in), diameter 53.3cm (21in)

 Photograph: ©Bonhams, by kind permission. Private collection

It seems curious that a 30-year-old woman should need, or feel obliged, to communicate with her lover about their personal procreation by coded drawings. (And possibly more bizarre to work up her sketches into oils, later to be exhibited in public and sold, as was the case with Opportunity above, admittedly after Evelyn and Mahoney had separated.) Perhaps procreation was something Evelyn found difficult to talk about. She may have had a distressing liaison in Germany some years earlier. Maybe it really was easier and less traumatic for her to express herself through drawings. There's no evidence that Mahoney ever saw her early sketches, which amplified an ingenious and original idea.

 

Studies for 'Maternity bud' (1) Pen and ink on writing paper. 1937. Photograph ©LissLlewellyn

In the top left hand corner there are the surround stems, growing out of a fluted bowl and culminating in a crudely-drawn sunflower. Mahoney is being invoked and addressed, through his trade-mark flower. In the centre is a shape perhaps reminiscent - at this stage - of a sheaf of wheat, being held together by a small boy wrapping his arms round it. Various unexplained shapes occupy the bulbous swelling at the top of the sheaf. Moving clockwise, the sheaf gives way in prominence to a roughly drawn peacock, probably another reference to Mahoney and Evelyn's habit of sometimes calling him (with no hint of a ruder vernacular) 'cock' and 'matey cock'.

Further clockwise, the bulge at the top of the sheaf appears to show something quite remarkable: two shadowy human figures, apparently wrapped in a sort of caul. Finally, more detail of the small boy hugging the sheaf. A similar sketch amplifies some of these elements:

Studies for 'Maternity bud' (2) Pen and ink on writing paper. 1937. Photograph ©LissLlewellyn

 Moving left to right, the 'sheaf' is now seen to contain, and to shelter and protect in its folds, a mother-figure centrally with - it isn't very clear - a tiny baby on her left and a slightly older one on her right. The sheaf-hugging boy is shown in greater detail. The fluted bowl is set in a formal garden, with gateposts, a columned balustrade and two attendant peacocks, like heraldic supporters. The stem of the plants, here reduced to a single line, has somehow retained its thorns. 

Finally Evelyn arrives at a version close to the definitive image at the top of this essay:

Sketch for 'Maternity bud' (3) Pen and ink on writing paper. 1937. Photograph ©LissLlewellyn

The same peacocks in their balustraded parkland, the same stem (although without its thorns), the same sunflower insistence, but a little more detail in the human figures contained within the folds of what is now more evidently not a caul, but a sort of prepuce: a mother-figure centrally, babies either side. Perhaps we can now see that the boy gives scale to the phallus he is holding upright and erect. In botany the bud contains the seed: the phallus resembles the stem and the bud. Is she implying that the maternity for which she longed lay at the tip of Mahoney's manhood?  

Did Mahoney ever see these drawings? It's possible that he never did. All Evelyn's known letters to Mahoney are preserved in the Tate Archive, the generous gift of his daughter. Although some letters from the final anguished months of their relationship may have been suppressed, none of the known letters contains material anything like that shown here. This material comes exclusively from the Hammer Mill Oast collection, the contents of Evelyn's residual studio, passed on to her siblings at her death in 1960.

Although Mahoney, in a hearsay and unverifiable remark, replied to Evelyn's urgings by saying children would stunt both their careers, nevertheless he presumably responded to some extent, because in the autumn of 1937 Evelyn miscarried. The authority for this was Roger Folley, the RAF officer and - in peace time - horticultural economist, whom she married in 1942, and in whom she confided when, to her mortification, it was discovered that she was unable to conceive. 

In the spring of 1936 Evelyn left the Brockley lodgings she had rented while working on the later Brockley murals and returned to The Cedars. She saw Mahoney at weekends. Occasionally they went to stay with friends together, notably with Edward and Charlotte Bawden at Great Bardfield, where because of their dedication to gardening they had been for some time nicknamed 'Adam and Eve'. This was the summer of the Opportunity images. It was also the summer dominated by Gardeners' Choice, planning, writing, choosing plants and travelling to see them, sometimes to Evelyn's aunt, the green-fingered Clara Cowling, whose East Sussex house, Steellands, featured in some of Evelyn's decorative vignettes. To work on the book Mahoney sometimes went to stay near Evelyn in Rochester, not at The Cedars, but at 42 St Margaret's Street, not far from the castle and cathedral. We can perhaps dare to hope that Evelyn was happy in that summer and autumn: she and Mahoney were working together on a joint project and the subject of a closer union through children had at least been broached.

Work continued on the book throughout the spring of 1937. Evelyn sketched Mahoney drawing plants that would feature in Gardeners' Choice. Paul, the Dunbars' dog, seems unimpressed.

Charles Mahoney drawing plants in the garden at The Cedars, spring 1937. Unidentifiable plant above; Bergenia crassifolia in the lower drawing

 

It's difficult to establish what happened through the summer and early autumn of 1937. A conjectural succession of events can perhaps be listed as follows, but not necessarily in the order in which they occurred:

*Routledge intend to include Gardeners' Choice in their Christmas 1937 list. Proofs have to be in by September if the book is to appear on booksellers' shelves in good time. 

*Edward Bawden is reminded of his undertaking to write a Foreword to Gardeners' Choice. His much-delayed MS arrives at 42 St Margaret's Street, where Mahoney is staying, on September 3rd. It needs considerable editing. Mahoney tells him it has arrived too late for inclusion. (Bawden's text was discovered among Mahoney's papers in c.2010. It was included in facsimile in Persephone Books' 2015 reprint of Gardeners' Choice.)

*Evelyn discovers she is pregnant.

*Mahoney and his brother Jim buy a cottage in Wrotham, near Maidstone, for their mother Bessie. Mahoney, who has been living for some years in a succession of lodgings, including the Hampstead studio Evelyn rented in 1933-5, moves in too. Evelyn has not been told. Her dreams of living with Mahoney are shattered.

*Evelyn and Mahoney have separated. She works overtime preparing  Gardeners' Choice for publication on her own, all in longhand. There is an unknown quantity of re-writing. It is probably this that caused Roger Folley to say, many years later, that 'Evelyn wrote most of Gardeners' Choice'. In any case it was supposed that a greater share of the writing fell to Evelyn, while Mahoney was responsible for most of the plant drawings. As time passes, however, and as more and more drawings of plants featured in Gardeners' Choice appear from the long-lost Hammer Mill Oast collection, i.e. Evelyn's residual studio, it's clear that she drew far more than the modest quantity originally assigned to her.

*In the closing months of 1937 Evelyn miscarries. It's likely that, alone of the Dunbars, her mother Florence knows.

* * *

There's a bizarre little footnote to all this. As mentioned above, Mahoney kept all Evelyn's letters to him. In 1941 he married Dorothy Bishop, primarily a calligrapher. Some years later the Mahoneys' Christmas card appeared, designed by Dorothy. Here it is, shown next to one of Evelyn's Opportunity letters from 1936. Very strange.

 

 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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

         

Evelyn's Farmers Weekly quiz (1954)

 

Farmers Weekly puzzle chart quiz: March 1954

 

In 1954 Evelyn was commissioned by the magazine Farmers Weekly to contribute to a regular feature called The Farming Year: Farmers Weekly Puzzle Chart. Perhaps they came out every month: Evelyn's is dated March 1954.

 

Competitors were asked to identify each of the activities shown and to indicate at which time of year - Winter, Spring, early Summer, late Summer, Autumn - each might take place. A further five activities, not among those illustrated, were to be suggested by the competitor, one for each of the specified times of year.  Answers on a postcard, etc. It wasn't stated what the prize(s) might be.

 

Shown is Evelyn's proof copy of what must have been a double page spread, as found recently among her residual papers stored in a Kentish oasthouse since her death in 1960. If you have the means to enlarge it, well and good. If not, I'm sorry to be unable to reproduce a more legible image. But even in its unredeemed state - one might almost say un-ironed - the pen-and-ink draughtsmanship is exquisite, a culmination of so many of her agricultural images since her time as a war artist closely involved with the Women's Land Army. Indeed, one of her images comes straight from her war years: No. 7 harks back to Singling Turnips, recorded on a Berwickshire farm in the spring of 1943:

Singling Turnips 1943 Oil on canvas Photograph ©England & Co. Private collection

 

These pen-and-ink drawings are the last in a short series of farming images. The most extensive was A Book of Farmcraft (Longmans, London, 1942) written by Michael Greenhill, senior instructor at Sparsholt Agricultural Institute, Hampshire, where Evelyn was posted in 1940 to record Land Girls in training. We see the same very careful draughtmanship in some of her illustrations for A Book of Farmcraft, which sold over 40,000 copies.

 

Illustrations from A Book of Farmcraft. (But might one of the questions in the Farmers Weekly quiz feature a certain right/wrong anomaly?)

 

 A Book of Farmcraft was followed several years later by A Farm Dictionary (Evans Brothers, London, 1953). Derek Chapman, a senior instructor at the College of Estate Management in Reading, wanted to compile an entry-level dictionary of farming terms. Chapman knew both Roger Folley, Evelyn's husband, and her A Book of Farmcraft; the circle was squared; Evelyn apparently was very happy to contribute to a sympathetic project emanating from the town in which she had been born. Accordingly she produced almost 100 small drawings, some done with the same concentration as those in the Farmers Weekly quiz above (see Oast-house in the selection below), others in which her lightness of touch is the foil to some little witticism or joke, as in Lean-to or Smoker below.

 

Copies of A Farm Dictionary, which was the last book Evelyn illustrated, are extremely rare. Occasionally Evelyn's studies for individual drawings, survivors from some 60 years of storage in far from ideal conditions, come up for sale. 

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

 

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're 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

Sidelands (1959)

Sidelands Oil on canvas 1960 Location unknown

 

There's a certain pathos about this incomplete image. 'Sidelands' is the name of a farm at the foot of the North Downs a mile or two to the east of the village of Wye, in Kent. It would have been well known to Evelyn, whose husband Roger Folley lectured on horticultural economics at Wye College.

 

To sketch it prior to painting Evelyn would have had to drive the few miles down the road to Wye from Hastingleigh, where she and Roger lived at Staple Farm. She may have cycled, but while the downhill run is easy, it's a stiffish climb back up to Staple Farm, and in 1959 Evelyn's heart wasn't in a very good condition. 

 

Sidelands stood on an easel in Evelyn's studio when she died, in May 1960. Its studio neighbours were Jacob's Dream, which also incorporates local landscape, and Autumn and the Poet. To me the season - always a vital element in Evelyn's paintings - suggests late summer or early autumn, so it's possible that she was painting Sidelands in September or October 1959.

 

After Evelyn's death Roger Folley collected her residual studio together, packed it in boxes and portfolios and consigned most of it to Alec Dunbar, the younger of her two brothers and the only Dunbar sibling with room to house it. However Roger Folley kept back a handful, maybe more, of Evelyn's paintings, some for sale (like Jacob's Dream), some family portraits and some local landscapes (like Wye from Olantigh) including the unfinished Sidelands. 

 

In the early 2000s Roger made a gift of several of Evelyn's paintings still in his care, particularly any with an agricultural or horticultural context, to Wye College Senior Common Room. I don't know the terms of the gift, if any, but they hung in corridors and lecturing staff offices for several years, until Wye College closed down in 2009. Imperial College, London, of which Wye College had been the agricultural campus, assumed ownership of Evelyn's paintings, among them the magnificent An English Calendar, and transferred them to its London premises. Not all of them made it: Evelyn's little Land Girl Milking was reported by the Kensington and Chelsea Gazette as having been stolen from a private address in May 2010.

Land Girl Milking Oil on canvas 1940 Location unknown

 

Before making the donations to Wye College Senior Common Room, Roger Folley had photographs taken of the pictures he intended to give. These included Land Girl Milking, above, and (very suitably) Market Garden at Naaldwijk, the only painting Evelyn completed outside of the United Kingdom. I believe, although I'm happily open to correction, that Market Garden at Naaldwijk was shown at the 2006 Evelyn Dunbar exhibition at the St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery, Lymington, curated by Dr Gill Clarke and timed to coincide with publication of her biography Evelyn Dunbar: War and Country.

 

                                

 Market Garden at Naaldwijk 1957 Oil on canvas Location unknown

But what of Sidelands? Roger Folley himself took the photo at the top of this essay. He was approaching 90 and almost blind. The picture was taken outside, propped on a dustbin or similar and photographed. He could not see that he had inadvertently missed maybe three-quarters of the painting. Satisfied that he had kept a record of something that was about to pass out of his stewardship, he put his photo in a folder, along with the other images mentioned here, which subsequently came to me.

Until it comes to light, this is all we have of Sidelands. Maybe fortuitously we have the essence of Evelyn's message: the gate is open, wide open, for us to pass through into the organised and productive land beyond; the land, the creator's gift (capital C optional) to mankind, is being looked after on the terms in which the gift was made. There is no exclusion: the gift is for all mankind, on condition that it is looked after with industry, intelligence and love. Suppose she had painted Sidelands with the gate shut? What a different, negative message that would have carried. 

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