An English Calendar (1938)

An English Calendar 1938 72 x 72in (182 x 182cm) Photo: Richard Valencia © Christopher Campbell-Howes. Imperial College, London

Evelyn's final exposition of the month-designs she had originally made for the Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary was in An English Calendar, the largest canvas she had attempted to date. A few of the months are old friends. April - subject of a previous post - is almost unchanged. February, however, has lost her complicit furtiveness, and not to her advantage, while August has lost her previous deeply personal autobiographical elements, the symbols of her desire and its fulfilment have been confiscated and she has become merely a pretty woman sitting on a garden bench and - these things are always important in Evelyn's work - looking into the ensemble of the composition rather than outside the frame. Similarly with some of her other Gardener's Diary precursors. Evelyn originally conceived of July like this:

 July from Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary

This chap is a wonderful July, a hands-down winner in comparison with the unexceptional village-vegetable-show figure in An English Calendar. He has harvested an enormous crop of vegetables, a cornucopia so impressive in its abundance that the outsize sack - it is almost a tarpaulin, not to speak of a conjuror's cloth - is not big enough to take them all, so that he has to hold under his arm the giant cabbage he has grown. So great is the tumbling profusion of these vegetables that their weight has smashed the fence. I can imagine Evelyn hugging herself with delight at the sudden appearance of this notion at the end of her pencil, this image of Nature's outrageous generosity endorsed and expressed as something quite normal by the deadpan and incurious expression on the gardener's face.

 As for September...

September from Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary

...while Evelyn has preserved the vegetable marrows in both versions, there's no doubt in my mind as to which Mrs September, this one or the more insipid version in An English Calendar, has the greater individuality and the stronger identification with the abundance of produce at what is traditionally Harvest Festival time in the United Kingdom. But there's more to it than that...

September from An English Calendar 1938

 

Moving from right to left, we have the same tumble of vegetable marrows, surely an enormous weight to be carried from the shoulder of the woman, who has become someone quite different, someone slighter and younger, little to compare with the comfortable Mrs September of the Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary above. These pen-and-ink drawings were finished in the summer of 1937 or even earlier, in good time for them to be transferred into plates and incorporated into the embryo diary, printed and ready for sale in the closing months of 1937. Who is this younger and slighter woman? Can she be identified?

I think she can. She is Evelyn herself. Moving further leftwards, she is holding a sunflower, partly surrounded by various flowers and trailing stringy roots. The sunflower is a recent deadhead; some petals remain, but the seeds have fallen from the cortex, the dark central part of the flower head. 

 

Throughout much of their four-year association, 1933-37, Evelyn represented Charles Mahoney, her former Royal College of Art tutor and later lover, as a sunflower, partly symbolically and partly as an identifier, because they appear so frequently in his work as to have become a sort of trademark. By 1937 their relationship was beginning to come apart, accelerating as Evelyn began to demand more of him than he was prepared to give. They were two very different people. The relationship could not have lasted: Evelyn  was a devout and committed Christian Scientist from a bourgeois provincial background, Mahoney leaned far to the left, viewing, as many artists did in the 1930s, Stalin's Russia as a promised land. Evelyn had a playful, subversive, not to say impish, and frequently feminist side to her nature, subtly nuancing much of her work, which the sometimes obtuse Mahoney often found tiresome.

 

In August 1937 Evelyn discovered she was pregnant. Mahoney left her in early September. In that month or maybe a little later Evelyn miscarried. An English Calendar carries one or two other images that might be called autobiographical - August, for instance, and April - but here in September Mahoney is reduced to a faded memorial bouquet. The autumn of 1937 marked the start what Evelyn later referred to as her 'crisis years', a largely fallow period characterised by bickering with her family and during which she painted comparatively little, a directionless period marked at its nadir with working behind the counter in her sisters' haberdashery shop in Rochester High Street; crisis years from which she was rescued by her appointment in 1940 as an official war artist and, later, by her marriage to Roger Folley in 1942.

 

* * *

 

An English Calendar was exhibited at Wildenstein's Gallery, London, in the spring of 1938. It attracted favourable press notices, with the exception the Left Review of May 1938, in which a critic calling himself 'Toros' wrote:
  

Evelyn Dunbar showed invention and fancy - rare qualities in these times. But her outlook is thoroughly petit-bourgeois. There is a small-town or suburban atmosphere about it - a contented preoccupation with the little details of life among cabbages and marrows. A larger horizon and subject-matter are required to give a real chance to her very considerable powers as a designer.

'Toros' was in fact Percy Horton, a tutor at the Royal College of Art and later Master of the Ruskin School in Oxford. Evelyn worked on his staff from c.1948 until her death in 1960; they had always been good friends. There's an irony here: I wonder if Horton would have levelled the same petit-bourgeois criticism if Evelyn had not substituted the very strong images originally designed for Gardener's Diary for the much paler and more anodyne figures that ended up in An English Calendar?

An English Calendar never sold, and in 1957 Evelyn donated it to Wye College, where Roger Folley lectured in horticultural economics. For years it hung in Withersdane Hall, the administrative centre of the college, giving rise to false rumours that it was a mural. When Wye College closed down, it was recovered by the parent body, Imperial College, in whose possession it still is.


Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2017; updated 2024

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