Brook from Amage (1959)

 

 Brook from Amage Oil on canvas 1959 Photograph Richard Valencia ©The author Private collection

 

Brook from Amage is among the last landscapes Evelyn painted. It dates from the early autumn of 1959; she died the following May. It's among the most personally revealing pictures from her brush.

 

We're in East Kent, not far from where Evelyn and her husband Roger Folley lived in the 1950s. Amage is the name of a farm standing on the road linking the villages of Brook and Wye, where Roger Folley lectured in horticultural economics at the College. This road runs along the foot of the North Downs, taking in views across arable land and pasture towards Brook, whose tiled roofs and Norman church appear, not very prominently, in the upper left-hand quarter of Evelyn's canvas.

 

Evelyn came late to landscape. Her portfolio opens with a few fairly drab East Sussex landscapes, chiefly around Ticehurst. Ticehurst was the home of her aunt Clara Cowling, with whom Evelyn used to stay occasionally, especially during what she called her 'crisis' years, 1937-40, following her separation from Charles Mahoney. A deeper and more consuming interest in landscape developed late in her career, in fact during the last few years of her life, 1950-60, the period when she and Roger Folley lived in a succession of houses in or about Wye. (No landscapes feature in her immediate post-war output, when her focus was chiefly on allegory.)

 

The title Brook from Amage, is succinct, to say the least. It's also almost unique: only one other landscape has a title given by Evelyn herself, the almost contemporary The Great Stour at Wye.

 

The Great Stour at Wye oil on canvas 1958 Photograph: Richard Valencia ©Christopher Campbell-Howes private collection

 

No other landscape is identified by Evelyn herself. If they have titles, they are bland and generalised, like Sussex Landscape, below, so named by Roger Folley:

 

'Sussex Landscape' oil on canvas c.1938 Photograph ©Christopher Campbell-Howes private collection

 

Wye from Olantigh was so named not by Evelyn, but simply through the tradition of the family that owned it. With Brook from Amage it's as though Evelyn wants us to know exactly where it represents. Brook from Amage isn't a particularly prepossessing landscape. While it's by no means disagreeable, it's not a scene of great natural beauty, it doesn't tick many of the boxes established by better-known landscape artists. Besides, it's raining, something quite unusual in landscape painting, but we'll come to that in a minute. I don't think for a moment that Evelyn is trying to distract us from admiration of the natural beauty of the extreme eastern corner of the Weald, but that she wants to tell us something else.

 

Superficially Brook from Amage is a pleasant, unassuming - one might say undemanding - pastoral scene. However, as in so much of Evelyn's work, there are several layers of significance. We might begin with the observation that the hand of man is evident everywhere, from the hedging to the buildings in Brook, from the telegraph poles to the curious tower structure on the horizon in the extreme top left-hand corner. More to Evelyn's point is the neat and organised layout of the fields as far as the eye can distinguish them, their different colourings testifying to rotations of crops and to a healthy balance between arable and stock farming: indeed, in the yellowish field centre right livestock - are they sheep? - are grazing among the residual stalks of harvested cereal. Everything is controlled, measured, productive, in fact 'a landscape worked and loved in equal measure', to quote a motto I once found, improbably, inscribed into the masonry of a car park wall on the Isle of Harris.

 

***

 

Evelyn arrived in East Kent in 1950, following Roger Folley's appointment at Wye College. To start with they rented a house called The Elms, which stood in an isolated and lonely position a half mile or so from the hamlet of Hinxhill. They had come from Oxfordshire, Evelyn leaving behind an active artistic life centred on the two Oxford art colleges at which she taught, the School of Art and the Ruskin. Although she continued to teach, travelling regularly to Oxford and back, for her the move was a savage separation from the circumstances which gave birth to some of her most mature and significant creation. 

 

Initially she found some relief from the isolation of The Elms in nearby Ashford, where there was a thriving Christian Science community, into which both she and her husband were made welcome. To what extent Roger Folley shared his wife's Christian Science is debatable, but I don't think he had any difficulty in sharing her ideas about what I have called the Covenant. This notion, that the Creator (with or without a capital C, as you think best) gave the earth freely to mankind, in return for mankind's promise to look after it with intelligence, industry and love, pervades Evelyn's work. To me its exact relationship within Christian Science is unclear. It maybe owes as much to her mother Florence as to Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. It's more clearly defined in various places in the Bible, most notably in Genesis, where God gives Adam - and Eve - the Garden of Eden to 'dress it and keep it'. It's also recognised in certain of the Psalms, which leads me to a curious circumstance, if I can be excused from relating a personal reminiscence.

 

In the mid 1950s, when I was in my early teens I used to stay at The Elms for a few days during most school holidays. I would be woken most mornings by a muffled recitation, maybe lasting ten minutes, from Roger's and Evelyn's bedroom next door. The exchanges were regular, as though they were reading to each other, each taking alternate passages. What they were reading was mostly unrecognisable, but in one instance it seemed to me that I had heard 'And thy clouds drop fatness', an expression memorable for its oddness. I recognised it; in a recent scholarship exam I'd had to compare and contrast two versions of Psalm 65, say King James and the Revised Version, in which vv. 10-13 run as follows:

 

Thou waterest the ridges thereof [i.e. the earth] abundantly: thou settlest the furrows thereof: thou makest it soft with showers: thou blessest the springing thereof.

Thou crownest the year with thy goodness: and thy clouds drop fatness.

They drop upon the pastures of the wilderness: and the little hills rejoice on every side.

The pastures are clothed with flocks; the valleys also are covered over with corn; they shout for joy, they also sing.

So it appeared that Roger Folley had been drawn into Christian Science from his Lancashire Methodist background, if only to the extent that he and Evelyn used to read the Bible together first thing in the morning. (I later learnt that they read from a programme of Bible readings suggested by the Christian Science Church.)

This is not to suggest that having read this passage Evelyn packed up her landscape gear and made for Amage to paint the farmland stretching across to Brook. The dates are wrong, for one thing: the painting comes from two or three years after my overheard Psalm-recitation. Besides, at the time Evelyn lived at The Elms: not a difficult journey, a little longer, but far out of step with an important spiritual implication we will come to presently.

But I can imagine that, having been familar for some time with that view and what it could be invoked to express, on one morning in September 1959 she did indeed pack her equipment, easel, camp stool, boxes of paints, sticks of charcoal and jars of brushes and maybe her umbrella into the back of their Morris Oxford Traveller. Her 10-minute journey would take her the two or three miles from her home at Staple Farm on the outskirts of Hastingleigh, a village on an escarpment of the North Downs, down Coldharbour Lane to its junction with Amage Road, along which she drove for a half-mile or so before arriving at Amage Farm. Here below is the view again, for reference purposes, and I can well imagine Evelyn's spiritual joy and uplift on confirming that it reflects those verses from Psalm 65 very closely indeed. But why should she choose a wet morning?

How do you paint rain? More particularly, how do you paint rain in a landscape that doesn't stray too far from the conventional? Evelyn starts with a grey and leaden sky, low rain-bearing clouds that have come in from the North Sea, judging by the way the cattle have turned their rumps towards the incoming weather. She would perhaps have had in mind a quotation from the book of Job - always a favourite with Evelyn - which she used in something from twenty years before, her Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary:

Who can number the clouds in wisdom? Or who can stay the bottles of heaven [...] ? (Job 38, 37; i.e Who can stop it raining?)

Evelyn has few means by which to emphasise the rain, but one stands out. It's surely no accident that in almost the exact centre of the picture she has painted a cow lying down. This cow is slightly separated from the rest of the herd, many of which are also lying down. While there may be no scientific proof that cows lie down when it's raining or about to rain, it's a widely enough held notion to carry Evelyn's point, and to acknowledge that into each life some rain must fall.

* * *

In 2007 Roger Folley, by that time 95, put together a statement entitled The Husband's Narrative. He distributed numbered copies among family and friends, in the wake of a burgeoning of interest in Evelyn's life and work, partly expressed through a 2006 exhibition to mark the centenary of her birth, and partly to redress certain imbalances in popular misconceptions about her, chiefly that she painted little in the post-war years when in fact the opposite was true. 

The Husband's Narrative mentioned for the first time something that had been a closed subject for many years: Evelyn's health and Christian Science teaching. Evelyn died suddenly and unexpectedly in May 1960, aged 53. Roger wrote in The Husband's Narrative:

'Apparently in good health, she passed away without warning or farewell: no bed, no walls, just the clouds. The manner of her death caused much heart searching. Just once she mentioned "I've never felt quite right since we went to the dance" meaning the All Night Ball at the senate House, in 1958. She was not suffering in any way that I could see and I left her to deal with it in her own way: it was not life-threatening'.

How Evelyn dealt with a condition that led to coronary atheroma - the cause of death given on her death certificate - can only be guessed at. Death from coronary atheroma results from a gradual build-up of fatty tissues in the blood vessels surrounding the heart. Symptoms include progressive fatigue, breathlessness and chest pain among others over months. As a Christian Scientist Evelyn would have dealt with this as something of satanic origin, to be treated with denial of its existence, fortified by prayer. It's with great temerity that I make the suggestion that she tried to come to terms with the physical problems, perhaps a temporary crisis that she was experiencing, through her work, in particular through Brook from Amage. Moreover, she didn't sign it, and although the signing or initialling of her work can occasionally be inconsistent, Evelyn does not sign work that is unfinished or, more importantly, work that is a testament to a personal problem or struggle.

The right hand side of Brook from Amage takes the viewer across the fields westwards towards the Great Stour and beyond to the low hills on the horizon, Challock Lees and Eastwell Park. The left hand, south western side is more specific. The eye follows a diagonal line sketched by some foreground foliage (which Evelyn may never have completed), passing a beech or oak still in full green leaf, almost touches the chancel, the eastern end of Brook church, picks up the road leading up Spelders Hill and finishes with a curious building, a tower. What lies beyond, over the horizon, is hidden from the viewer.

But Evelyn knows very well what lies beyond. The top of Spelders Hill turns out to be the end of a ridge. A few hundred metres along it lies The Elms, the house in which Evelyn lived from 1950 until almost the end of 1957.

 The Elms, Hinxhill: Evelyn's and Roger Folley's home 1950-57

It was at The Elms that Evelyn was at her most contented. As mentioned above, it took a little while for her to acclimatise and find her feet, but once settled she embarked on a period of her life during which she produced some of her most remarkable work. (Her studio, with a strong north light, stood between the porch and the conservatory.) She maintained a teaching presence in Oxford, and started taking a few private pupils locally. She played a full part in the cultural life of Wye College, arranging lectures from eminent artists and musicians. She designed scenery and sets for the college Drama Club. She enjoyed fell-walking and rock-scrambling holidays in the Lake District and skiing in the French Alps. She provided weekend and sometimes longer accommodation for boys from the Caldecott Community, a nearby children's home. She played a full part in the activities of the East Kent Art Society. She had a wonderful gift for friendship, specifically within the Christian Science congregation and more generally in the local community. She was closer to her family, based in Rochester and Maidstone, than she had been when living in Oxfordshire. 

All these riches were associated with The Elms. Although they continued unabated at Tan House, a stopgap house in the village of Wye before moving in 1958 to Staple Farm, her activities had their full measure at The Elms, where I think she was free of the pain that assailed her progressively from mid-1958 onwards. Brook from Amage is an acknowledgement partly of discomfort-free days over the horizon, and partly of troubles that were current when she sought to combat them through this painting. I suspect that the following lines from the book of Job -

The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. (Job 1 v21)

- were never very far away from her thoughts in her last months.

 Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2023. 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