Looking beyond the frame: the world outside
AUGUST
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. It's a technique which Evelyn uses to express this, as though the frame was a prison, or as though the real story lay outside it. I start with August (1938).
August 1938 Oil on canvas Photo Michael Shaw ©Christopher Campbell-Howes Private collection.
We've met August 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 above 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 almost a savagery about Evelyn's brushwork that is totally absent from its sister pieces, February and April. This 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.
* * *
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.
DORSET
Dorset is another of Evelyn's paintings in which the subject looks out of the frame, and like August above the rarity of this arrangement indicates the importance she deliberately laid on her subject and its implications.
The fascinating back-story of Dorset is told here. Briefly, the figure is based on Anne Garland, heroine of Thomas Hardy's novel The Trumpet Major. She has climbed to a vantage point on Portland Bill, the southernmost point of the county of Dorset, which has wide views over the English Channel. The views are wide enough to encompass and follow the course of shipping up and down the Channel.
The date is September 16th, 1805, and the time is about 4pm. It's not certain that Evelyn knew this, or even needed to know it, although given the colouring of the grasses about her and the early autumnal feel of the landscape, maybe she has done some homework in the interests of historical accuracy. In fact these details come from a contemporary, and presumably incontrovertible, source: none other than the log of HMS Victory, outward bound from Portsmouth on a voyage down the English Channel skirting Portland Bill. This voyage will culminate five weeks later near Cadiz, off the Atlantic coast of Spain, by Cape Trafalgar.
Among the ship's company of HMS Victory are Bob Loveday, whom Anne Garland will eventually marry, Admiral Horatio Nelson and, to square the circle, the captain of HMS Victory, Thomas Masterman Hardy, whom Thomas Hardy the novelist claimed as a distant family relative. Both Hardys were Dorset men.
What the people of Britain - including the fictional Anne Garland - knew in the summer of 1805 was that Napoleon, intent on invading Britain, had gathered a massive fleet of transports at Boulogne to ferry his 200,000 strong army across the Channel. All he needed was the French navy to protect its passage for the few hours it would take to cross the Channel. In Napoleon's words: 'Let us be masters of the Channel for six hours, and we are masters of the world'.
At Trafalgar on October 21st 1805 the French fleet was destroyed. Britain was safe. Part of the price Britain paid for salvation was the death of Nelson, shot by a sniper high in the rigging of a French ship. (In
fact Napoleon, ever impatient with the non-arrival of his navy, struck
camp at Boulogne in late August and marched off to trouble southern
Germany. The whole vast but eventually futile enterprise had been
financed by the Louisiana Purchase, the sale of Louisiana by France to
the infant United States.)
End of history lesson. Not, of course, that you needed it, but it gives us the background against which Anne Garland, conscious and fearful of great national danger threatening, focuses her gaze through the protective shield of her hands to a point beyond the frame where the great battleship - with her suitor on board - slowly disappears over the western horizon.
We move on to something curiously similar:
PUTTING ON ANTI-GAS PROTECTIVE CLOTHING
Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing 1940 Oil on canvas Imperial War Museum, London
Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing was among the first of Evelyn's war paintings. Perhaps unexpectedly, it bears comparison with Dorset
above. It's another of the very few paintings in Evelyn's output in
which the principal subject - seen alone in the final box - is looking
beyond the frame, indicating something particularly significant or
important. It was very well received by the War Artists' Advisory
Committee, to the extent that Evelyn appears to have received a bonus
payment for it by order of Sir Kenneth Clark, the WAAC chairman. It was
painted in May and June, 1940.
At the outbreak of war in September 1939 gas attacks, using the same gases - phosgene, chlorine and mustard gas - as those used in World War 1 were widely expected. Gas masks were issued to the entire British population. Warning, recovery and primary care, particularly in the cities, of victims of gas attack were entrusted to Air Raid Precautions (later called Civil Defence), a civilian organisation drawing its members partly from the Women's Voluntary Service, which is exactly what Evelyn's subjects were. By the final frame her principal subject, helmeted and dressed in rubberised anti-gas material probably dating from World War 1, is facing with grim determination the dreadful threat from German poison gas bombing raids...
...which never happened. However, before Evelyn's paint was fully dry the threat of gas had been replaced by something else. In late May and early June 1940 the news was grim. The British army, maintaining a presence in northern France since the outbreak of war, had been outmanœuvred and driven by Hitler's armies to the Channel coast. An enormous rescue operation, overseen by the Royal Navy, evacuated thousands of British, Commonwealth and French troops from the beaches of Dunkirk. Immense amounts of equipment were abandoned. The army was broken. Soon afterwards France fell. The German army lay poised to invade.
And in the few weeks' interim between Evelyn sketching out her first designs and signing off Anti-Gas Protective Clothing
in the bottom right hand corner, there was a change of Prime Minister:
the ineffectual Neville Chamberlain was replaced by Winston Churchill.
Evelyn has tilted her subject's head in an attitude of defiance and
determination, which cleverly allows us to see her face through the
perspex of her gas mask. It is this expression which make me wonder if
she had seen a photograph of Winston Churchill at much the same time,
similarly looking resolutely upwards and outwards towards the national
peril.
JOSEPH IN THE PIT
Joseph in the Pit Oil on canvas 1947 Photograph Petra van der Wal ©Christopher Campbell-Howes Private collection
Here
is poor Joseph, youngest of Jacob's sons and his father's favourite. If
he's unfamiliar through reading of Genesis, Chapter 37, he's reasonably
universally known though the late 1960s musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Evelyn's picture above is the second of a trilogy of paintings illustrating crucial moments in the Joseph story. The first is Joseph's Dream, begun in about 1937 and analysed here, and the third is Joseph in Prison, completed some 12 years later.
Joseph's
brothers, destined to become the founding fathers of the 12 tribes of Israel, detested Joseph
bitterly, partly because of his favoured family standing and partly
because of his boastfully egocentric dreams. The brothers plotted to
kill him, but were dissuaded from murder by the eldest, Reuben, who
suggested that they should let nature take its course by robbing him of
his coat of many colours and throwing him into a pit, where he would
certainly die of starvation or be eaten by a wild beast.
* * *
Shortly after World War 2 Evelyn went with her husband Roger Folley to the Yorkshire dales, a walking expedition which included exploring Gordale Scar, a massive limestone ravine, possibly a collapsed cave. Has she invoked Gordale Scar as the backdrop for Joseph's discomfiture? Was this the trigger for the continuation and completion of Evelyn's long-considered Joseph trilogy?
Joseph in the Pit is unique in a curious way. It's the only painting in her entire canon (we exclude minor works like mice climbing Lake District mountains) which features mountainous scenery in the form of bare unyielding rock, with not the slightest hint of any form of growth or hint of regeneration, in which the hand of man hasn't intervened to work the land. So Joseph is condemned to die...apparently.
Joseph in the Pit
is unusual, if not quite unique, in another way: it's another of the
very few of Evelyn's paintings in which the principal subject
is looking out beyond the frame, searching, regretting, identifying,
welcoming something of the greatest personal or general significance.
Here Joseph, stripped of everything apart from a sort of undershirt,
looks despairingly upwards for any sign of help. Maybe Evelyn, as she
often did, had a line of a Psalm handy as she conceived the design of
her painting, perhaps Psalm121: I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help, in the 17th century diction she loved.
And of course help did come, in the form of a band of desert nomads who discovered Joseph, hauled him up, took him to Egypt with them and sold him as a slave. He never looked back.
ZACCHAEUS
'Zacchaeus' pre-1933 Pen and wash heightened with white on paper Signed 'E.Dunbar' Private collection
I ought to preface 'Zacchaeus' and its back story by putting CONJECTURE ALERT
at the head: what follows is the piecing together of several sometimes
quite disparate elements in the hope of composing a convincing
narrative. Alas, some of what follows is guesswork - informed guesswork,
I hope, but still more conjecture than good scholarship has houseroom
for. If any reader knows better or has information to add to the
following reconstruction, please leave a comment. I'd be very grateful!
* * *
In the final months of Evelyn's postgraduate year at the Royal College of Art Evelyn volunteered to join a small team of recent graduates to decorate the hall at Brockley School for Boys in south-east London. She did so at the invitation of her mural tutor, Charles Mahoney. It was a big project, and the work lasted, largely uninterrupted, for a little under three years, April 1933 to February 1936. As the project neared its end, by which time Evelyn and Mahoney had become lovers, she looked about for other projects and commissions. One result of her search was an invitation in March 1936 by Athole Hay, Registrar at the Royal College of Art, to submit mural designs for the interior decoration of some new buildings at the University of London.
To accompany this request she was asked to submit a supporting portfolio of her work, to be delivered to Athole Hay at the Royal College of Art, and this she did. What happened to this portfolio is not known. It seems to have disappeared from the RCA. Having left the RCA three years before, Evelyn no longer had an automatic entrée there, even less after she and Mahoney separated in 1937. There's some suggestion in the Evelyn-Mahoney correspondence, now housed in the Tate Archive, that she asked him to collect it or at least enquire about it. Evelyn was concerned that it shouldn't fall into unauthorised hands. There the story dies until many years later.
It was in 2010 or thereabouts that a very fine pen and ink drawing, rather hurriedly signed 'E Dunbar' in the style she favoured in the mid-1930s, came to light in a document drawer in a piece of furniture once belonging to Eric Ravilious, who died in 1942. When his daughter Anne Ullmann told me about it she had no idea how it came to be there. Although he never taught Evelyn, Eric Ravilious had taught at the Royal College of Art throughout the years of her studentship and thereafter. Evelyn and Ravilious hardly knew each other. The likelihood, but pure conjecture, is that the pen and ink drawing had come from Evelyn's missing portfolio.
* * *
It's an impressive piece of work, of a depth rarely achieved with pen, ink and wash, heightened with white, alive with movement and excitement. Here it is again for reference:
This, then, is another in this mini-series of images Evelyn has created in which a principal figure is looking beyond the frame. Clearly something very exciting is about to happen. A star-struck, enraptured girl is looking out of the frame at something so blinding, so brilliantly powerful that the girl next to her has to shield her eyes. Other people (I can count sixteen), it seems of all ages, are hurrying to see what's going on, what's happening beyond the frame, who's coming. And two, to get a better view, are climbing a tree, one by ladder and one, not an enormous person, by rope or - it isn't clear - rope ladder, slung from a much higher branch. What is happening?
Could
there be a clue in St Luke, chapter 19? Is Evelyn using a technique popularised by Stanley Spencer, that of depicting Bible narratives in contemporary settings? Has Evelyn transported her
imagination to 1st Century AD Jericho, clothing her scene in modern
dress?
And Jesus entered and passed through Jericho. And behold, there was a man called Zacchaeus...and he sought to see Jesus who he was; and could not for the press, because he was little of stature. And he ran before, and climbed up into a sycomore tree to see him: for he was to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up, and saw him, and said unto him, Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down; for today I must abide at thy house...
But how did this drawing come into Eric Ravilious' possession? Better not to ask, surely. A conjecture too far.
THE QUEUE AT THE FISH SHOP
The Queue at the Fish Shop Oil on canvas 1942-5 Imperial War Museum
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.
LAND GIRLS GOING TO BED
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 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?
Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2025. All rights reserved.
EVELYN DUNBAR : A
LIFE IN PAINTING by Christopher Campbell-Howes
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