Pea Pickers at Ripper's Cross 1951 oil on canvas 14 x 18in (35.3 x 45.5cm). Imperial War Museum
In 1950 Evelyn's husband, Roger Folley, who since World War 2 had been working for Oxford University Agricultural Research Department, took up a new and more rewarding post at Wye College, in east Kent. Wye College was the centre of the agricultural economics campus of Imperial College, London. While the move meant new professional horizons for Roger, for Evelyn it meant abandoning the many colleagues and friends she had at Oxford, chiefly centred on the Ruskin School of Art, where she had been teaching.
Leaving Oxford was a difficult time for Evelyn, a wrench and a painful separation, aggravated by the house she and Roger rented, The Elms, being as isolated as anywhere can be in rural Kent. At first solitary and unemployed, she found it to some extent in the Christian Science Reading Room in nearby Ashford. The Ashford Christian Scientists appear to have been an integrated and energetic group, mainly of women of much the same age as Evelyn, who was 44 in December 1950.
Apart from formal lectures and seminars, Roger Folley's Wye College work included visiting local farms, establishing a rapport with them, arranging and overseeing student placements and generally working in tandem with these farms to maximise efficiency and productivity. One such farm was Ripper's Cross, close to the village of Hothfield, west of Ashford, where the farm manager was called Allender. In due course the two couples, Folley and Allender, met: Evelyn and Marcella Allender took to each other at once, both quickly forming part of a circle of close friends.
With Pea Pickers at Ripper's Cross it seems that Evelyn has reverted to her wartime Women's Land Army images, but resemblance is superficial and if the Imperial War Museum accepted the gift (from a Mr David Bunker, a frequent visitor to the Allenders) in 1992 of Pea Pickers at Ripper's Cross it was not because of any community with its existing group of Dunbars. In fact it has no connection with her wartime painting; Evelyn's employment by the War Artists' Advisory Committee ceased in 1945, six years previously.
It's a spontaneous work, as cheerful and glad-hearted as ever, as though Evelyn had driven the few miles from The Elms to Hothfield to call on Marcella Allender, with whom she had gone for a walk down the Bethersden road. Was she struck by the unexpected flecks and flashes of colour of a gang of pea-pickers, themselves like a sudden patch of wild flowers?
No time, then, to do more than briefly record the overall scene in her sketchbook, or possibly on the back of a bill or an envelope: the geometry of the fields, the stately procession of cumulus humilis clouds, some midfield oaks, outliers of the remnants of the ancient Wealden forest stretching to the western horizon; no time to do more than hint at the bulbous shapes in the foreground so that we can't be certain what they represent, other than reminding us that nature's gifts rarely come in forms that are pinched or skeletal. By contrast the human figures, which I imagine Evelyn putting in on her return from Hothfield, are carefully drawn, their postures and attitudes convincingly recorded as they bend among the notoriously straggly and tangled pea-vines to snap off the pods and put them into sacks.
Did Evelyn consider this painting finished? Her general principle was not to sign anything unless it was finished. There's no signature here. Perhaps it doesn't matter. Pea Pickers at Ripper's Cross says enough to us about the Weald, about harmonies of green, about the closeness of mankind to the soil, about the eternal year-round organic whole. And maybe about peace after conflict, which is perhaps why the Imperial War Museum accepted it.
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Thanks to Mr Colin, one time resident of Ripper's Cross Farm, for his contribution.
Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2024. All rights reserved.
by Christopher Campbell-Howes
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