Looking beyond the frame: (6) The Queue at the Fish Shop, (7) It weren't me, Miss

 

The Queue at the Fish Shop Oil on canvas 1942-5 Imperial War Museum

In this mini-series of Evelyn's paintings and drawings, in which figures look beyond the frame to some great matter, to something of particular importance, we come to The Queue at the Fish Shop of 1942-5. Excluding portraits, there are only 7 such figures: (1) August, (2) Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing, (3) Dorset, (4) Joseph in the Pit, (5) 'Zacchaeus', (6) The Queue at the Fish Shop, and (7) ...wait and see: Evelyn's little joke. (Or is it?)

Evelyn, in self-portrait, is looking at us. She's impassive, unsmiling. How it would have transformed the whole painting and minimised its impact if she had been smiling! Nor is she angry. (Evelyn never was: impatient sometimes, but never angry.) She's challenging our complacency, maybe our mistrust. Let's explore this in a little detail.

There are certain lines, actual or implied, in The Queue at the Fish Shop. The cyclist is Evelyn's husband, Flight Lieutenant Roger Folley, RAF. If you extend the line of Roger's handlebars (it does no harm to do it with a transparent plastic ruler on a reproduction), if you extend the line of the fold of his fore-and-aft cap, if you follow the line of heads in the left-hand queue, you arrive at the same point: the beginning of the inscription LARGE SUPPLIES OF FRESH FISH FROM THE COAST DAILY. Just at the moment, of course, there aren't any fish at all, and superficially Evelyn is pointing an inescapable irony. But there will be. It's a promise. The guarantor of that promise is Roger, standing for the Royal Air Force and by implication the armed services. It must have been very exciting for Evelyn to cast this mantle on the shoulders of her fiancé: she started The Queue at the Fish Shop to mark their engagement, in February 1942. It was a personal statement. It was by no means a War Artists' Advisory Committee commission.

My thesis in these six - but not the seventh - 'Beyond the Frame' images is that, deliberately or instinctively, Evelyn draws our attention to major themes - death, war, personal tragedy (as in August), religious epiphany (as in 'Zacchaeus') - by giving them an unseen offstage existence, and creating the onstage, on-canvas tension and drama through her characters' reactions to them. The Queue at the Fish Shop, is exceptional in that what is offstage is a guarantee, a promise kept. We aren't so very far, once again, from Evelyn's driving notion of the Covenant, the contract between the Creator and mankind: in return for mankind's love for and care of the earth, the Creator promises endless abundance. It's this that Evelyn, in an earnest stare that some feel uncomfortable to confront for very long, is asking us not to forget.

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(7) It weren't me, Miss

 Sketch for Land Girls Going to Bed 1943 Photograph ©Liss Llewellyn

Above is a sketch for Land Girls Going to Bed. These Land Girls were billeted in a large country house, probably in or near Wooler, Northumberland. Evelyn included them in her portfolio of images from the Borders in May, 1943. These young women have allowed Evelyn into their dormitory to record them preparing for bed. One might be already asleep, the girl in the bunk below turns out in the final oil version to be applying cold cream to her face, and there's nothing much to be said about the other two girls, one kneeling in front of a chest of drawers, the other sketched in profile in the foreground. In the final version, however, she takes on a character absent from the sketch. Here she is:

 Land Girls Going to Bed (detail)

What is she looking at, beyond the frame, as she tugs her Women's Land Army jumper over her liberty bodice? Evelyn doesn't tell us, but as we should know by now, there's always something else in her work, something hidden, something hinted at, something alluded to, something unexpected for us to discover, we mightn't be far out if we supposed that what the girl is looking at is a supervisor, maybe a warden, asking 'Right, who broke the bunk? Come on, own up!'

Here's the final version:

 Land Girls Going to Bed Oil on canvas 1943 Imperial War Museum

If we look carefully at the lower of the two visible bunks, the side rail, the one close to those slippers, has come adrift. The nearer end appears to rest on the floor, meaning that Cold Cream Girl is going to have a lop-sided night. If we dismissed this as poor draughtsmanship (which we shouldn't have done: artists of Evelyn's calibre just don't make mistakes like that), we've only to refer to her sketch: it's just as deliberate there. What's more, someone has placed that rush-seated chair so as to obscure the broken bed rail. Clearly there's been some larking about. Who bust it? Who was bouncing on it? I don't think the answer is far to seek. However momentous Evelyn's off-stage concerns are, no doubt this was of equally pressing immediate importance to the beady-eyed girl undressing. What do you think?

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This is the 100th post in this blog, and with it I take my leave of the thousands of readers who have stayed the course since I first started this series of essays and commentaries on Evelyn Dunbar's work in 2011.  Thank you all for your loyalty and support; I hope you've enjoyed reading them as much as I've enjoyed writing them. Best wishes to you all.

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2023. All rights reserved.