August 1938 Oil on canvas Photo Michael Shaw ©Christopher Campbell-Howes Private collection.
This is August. We've met her before, here. She first appeared in Evelyn's imagination as a line drawing in her Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary:
August 1937 Pen and ink, from Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary
When August was cleaned, some years after Michael Shaw's photograph was taken, several questions were raised, including whether she was looking out of the frame, or whether she had her eyes closed and was daydreaming about events past or, perhaps more importantly, to come.
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August (detail)
Is that an eye, peeping out from beneath her Elephant's Ear leaf hat, or an eyelash, suggesting that her eye is closed and that she is deep in thought? In the much sharper 1938 Gardener's Diary drawing, there's no suggestion of an eye at all.
And that garden seat...in the drawing the word '(Au)gust' appears in the iron work of the back-rest; Evelyn has edited it out from the oil version. Not only that: wrought iron garden seats in this general style appear in several places in Evelyn's images from the mid-1930s. Some are associated with the garden at Brick House, Edward and Charlotte Bawden's home in Great Bardfield, Essex, a place Evelyn used sometimes to visit with her lover Charles Mahoney, somewhere with particular significances in the development of their relationship. Here they are together, in a detail from a letter to Mahoney from the winter of 1934-35.
Detail from letter to Mahoney, winter 1934-35. Tate Archive, reference TGA200921 Personal papers of Charles Mahoney
But in August she is a solitary figure, alone with her thoughts and visions. Her erstwhile partner has disappeared.
* * *
August was painted in late 1937 or 1938, at a particularly difficult period of Evelyn's life. We can assume that the Gardener's Diary drawing came first, no later than the autumn of 1937, in good time for the 1938 diary to be on booksellers' and stationers' shelves, and that the painting followed later. The cleaning revealed a certain violence, indeed a savagery about Evelyn's brushwork totally absent from its sister pieces, February and April, that might lead one to believe that at some time in its history attempts had been made to overpaint some of the rawer episodes with a medium that flaked away in the cleaning process. These 'month' paintings, August, February and April, were never disposed of during Evelyn's lifetime. After her death, in 1960 at the age of 53, her husband Roger Folley passed them, together with almost her entire residual studio, to Alec Dunbar, the younger of Evelyn's two brothers. In due course August was assigned elsewhere in part settlement of an unpaid debt.
* * *
Figures which look out of the frame are very rare indeed in Evelyn's work. In all the hundreds of images which make up her work - portraits are excepted, of course - there are only seven. All seven, six women and one young man, are in the grip of very powerful emotions.
Here then is the first of the seven, August, taking the persona of Evelyn/Eve in the Garden of Eden, dressed in the scarlet of lust, forbidden fruit on her lap, the serpent disguised as a garden hose complete with pump, abandoned by her lover...and at this point we might wonder to what grim extent this painting is autobiographical. After an increasingly tottery relationship Evelyn and Mahoney separated in late August or early September of 1937. At that time or a little earlier Evelyn discovered she was pregnant. Early on in her pregnancy she miscarried. Much lay beyond the frame of her actuality. Her past expectations, her hopes for the future lay in ruins about her. Clearly she had much to ponder, eyes open or eyes closed.
Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2023. All right reserved
by Christopher Campbell-Howes
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