Princess Caroline Oil on canvas c.1952 Signed 'ED' Photograph ©Bonhams Private collection
In the mid- to late 1950s, in what were to be the last years of her life, Evelyn applied herself sporadically to a long-held ambition, the creation of books of rhymes and stories, games and activities for children. Unable to have children of her own, she enlisted friends and their children to help her in these compilations. A possible collaborator in Princess Caroline was a schoolfriend from 35 years before, Constance Breed (as she later became), wife of the Rector of March, Cambridgeshire, and her children.
None of these projects was ever completed. Evelyn died in 1960, when she was 53. The only insight we have into them are the many sketches she left behind of children skipping, leap-frogging, playing tig, hiding and seeking and so on, some with suggestions of titles. (There is a 1924-50 compilation of Evelyn's images of children here.)
Sketch for Some Games, c.1952.
The inscription at the foot of the right-hand page of the Some Games sketch above appears to mention 'Puffin', and perhaps Evelyn was also thinking of producing something in the Picture Puffin list, a popular series of books for children first envisaged by the publisher and designer Noel Carrington. Carrington had commissioned pre-war work from Evelyn and had once been her Hampstead landlord, but nothing came of this connection. More fully-worked sketches lead us towards what might have been:
Some Games Sketches 1: 'Atishoo, atishoo, all fall down'. Water colour, c.1952
Some Games Sketches 2: Skipping. Water colour, c.1952
Some Games Sketches 3: Ring-a-Ring-o'-Roses. Water colour, c.1952
These children represent Evelyn's own cultural and social milieu: middle class, white, prosperous, cultivated. Some of them will be World War 2 children, variously designated by later demographers as the Silent Generation or Baby Boomers. The ring of children in Sketch 3 above have danced their way into Princess Caroline; Evelyn has cleverly insisted that the ring is unbroken behind the giant tulip.
At least three sketches exist inscribed Princess Caroline, in which a girl is washing her long blonde hair in a tub out of doors. In the lower left-hand corner of Sketch 1 below, much reduced, the same figure - we can suppose - is just discernible standing inside a tulip-type flower and is looking out, as though from a sailing ship's crow's nest.
Princess Caroline Sketch 1 Pen and water-colour c.1952 Photograph © Liss Llewellyn Private collection
* * *
Princess Caroline, not the best-known of children's rhymes, runs:
Princess, Princess Caroline,
Washed her hair in cowslip wine.
Cowslip wine makes it shine:
(The original, or perhaps the parody, of this fairly ancient rhyme was scurrilously applied to the future wife of George II, Princess Caroline of Anspach, substituting 'turpentine' for 'cowslip wine'.)
In the oil version of Princess Caroline we have the subject, again standing in the tulip
flower, allowing her long blonde hair, freshly washed and shining, to hang over
the edge of a petal. Given the work and thought that went into Evelyn's
composition, it seems likely that she intended it, suitably reproduced, to
feature prominently in a collection of sometimes unfamiliar
children's rhymes, maybe as the frontispiece.
Another possibility is that Evelyn, having selected it from a water-colour original, worked it up into oils as a gift, perhaps personalising it with recognisable images of children, especially the robust lad lying on his back on a tulip leaf, and the girl opposite him, both apparently gazing at the cascade of freshly-washed blonde hair from the flower above.
* * *
In 1947 Evelyn was appointed to the staff of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford by the Master, Albert Rutherston. Rutherston, brother of Sir William Rothenstein, for whom Evelyn was something of a protégée, had anglicised his surname, as did many people of German extraction, in the shadow of World War 1. Evelyn, Rutherston and his circle enjoyed an amicable relationship, one that continued after she left Oxford to settle in Kent in 1950, while continuing to teach at the Ruskin as an occasional Visitor.
The circumstances of the subsequent history of Princess Caroline are vague. A possible scenario is that it was a gift from either Rutherston or Evelyn to Patricia Koring (the subject of several of Rutherston's portraits, sometimes described as his muse) in recognition of a family birth, maybe as something suitable for hanging in the nursery. Evelyn provided a frame for it, possibly adapting the frame that originally enclosed her similarly-sized Woman with a Dog (1938), retrieved from the New English Art Club's 1947 exhibition.
Princess Caroline was sent for auction in 2023. It's always a special moment when a hitherto unknown canvas by Evelyn, unseen in public for some 70 years, makes its appearance.
With thanks to Emeritus Professor Kenneth McConkey for his input and to Anne Skilbeck for hers.
Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2024. All rights reserved.
by Christopher Campbell-Howes
is available to order online from:
448 pages, 301 illustrations. RRP £30