Evelyn Dunbar

Sunday, 12 May 2013

Jacob's Dream (1960)

Jacob's Dream 1960 oil on canvas Photograph © England & Co. Private collection.

This extraordinary painting is Evelyn's farewell.

Towards the end of April, 1960, I went to see Evelyn and her husband Roger at their home in Staple Farm, Hastingleigh, in Kent, as I did for a few days during most school holidays. I was eighteen; it was the last time I saw Evelyn. I learnt later that she had spent the previous weeks touring round her handful of relations and many friends in south-east England. What pain or discomfort due to coronary atheroma she was in we shall never know, nor to what extent she repressed it, but we can assume that some very powerful need must have driven her to visit her wide circle. She had been to see my mother a few days earlier. My mother felt that in some inexpressible way Evelyn had come to say goodbye.

Jacob's Dream stood on one easel in her studio, the recently-signed Autumn and the Poet on another. I was struck and moved by Jacob's Dream in a way that no other painting of Evelyn's ever had. I spoke to her at some length about it, and I wish I'd noted down some of the things she said about it, because what she said is to some extent forgotten.

She had wanted for a long time, she said, to round off her series of Genesis paintings. We know how fascinated she was by the great Abraham-Isaac-Jacob-Joseph family saga in the closing chapters of Genesis. I knew she had painted Joseph's Dream in at least two versions; she occasionally painted the same subject more than once. I had seen Joseph in the Pit and Joseph in Prison when she had exhibited them in her only solo exhibition, in Wye in 1953. She mentioned the story (which I knew already, having been to a very Bible-oriented, although not particularly religious, school) in Genesis, Chapter 28:

Jacob set out from Beersheba and went on his way to Harran. He came to a certain place and stopped there for the night because the sun had set; and, taking one of the stones there, he made it a pillow for his head and lay down to sleep. He dreamt that he saw a ladder, which rested on the ground with its top reaching to heaven, and angels of God were going up and down upon it. The Lord was standing beside him and said, I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. The land on which you are lying I will give to you and your descendants. [...] Jacob woke from his sleep and said, 'Truly the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.' Then he was afraid and said, 'How fearful is this place! This is no other than the house of God, this is the gate of heaven.' Jacob rose early in the morning, took the stone on which he had laid his head, set it up as a sacred pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He named that place Beth-El [...]
Thereupon Jacob made this vow: 'If God will be with me, if he will protect me on my journey and give me food to eat [...] then the Lord shall be my God, and this stone which I have set up as a sacred pillar shall be a house of God. (NEB)

Then we talked about the stone, the one on which Jacob's head is resting in the painting, which legend, ever unpredictable, said was somehow conveyed to Scotland to become the Stone of Scone, on which kings of Scotland were crowned. In 1296 it was taken as war booty by King Edward I of England. (It remained in London for 700 years, fitted inside the ancient wooden coronation throne in Westminster Abbey. In 1996 it was returned to Edinburgh.)

Evelyn had painted Jacob's Dream recently, within the last two months, a remarkably short time for a painting as finished as this canvas is. We spoke about the angels, the extraordinary white abstractions on the ladder. For some reason they sent shivers down my back: never before had Evelyn done anything so simple, yet so elemental. How these shapes shone against the perfect blue of a spring sky, how they seemed to shimmer up and down the ladder, propelled by...what? Heavenward prayers and oblations? Earthward epiphanies and forgivenesses? The souls of the departed? And of those - wild thought! - yet to be born? How drearily unconvincing traditional winged creatures would have been.

Jacob is lying, foreshortened very skilfully, in a field receding into the darkness of the night, with large stones scattered among the grass. He has thrown his travelling cloak - he's on a journey - over him, and maybe his left hand, out of sight below the frame, is holding some form of scrip or travelling bag for security. He looks relaxed, with his legs crossed at the ankles.

His dream takes place, like his son (some years into the future: Jacob is not yet married) Joseph's will do, within the oval that is our normal frame of vision. Evelyn doesn't give us the top right-hand extremities of the oval. We don't see the top of the ladder. She doesn't trespass into heaven, but leaves it to our imagination or discovery. Curiously, she has done this before, once in The Cock and the Jewel, her lunette in the Brockley Murals, as a tiny background detail, and once, more deliberately, in Omega of Alpha and Omega, the twin Bletchley panels of 1957. The foot of the ladder is resting just outside the oval frame of vision, as though to harness the reality of the physical, sleeping Jacob to the other, metaphysical reality (but can there be such a thing, outside a dream?) of the angels.

But there's a third reality, the dream background. There are orchards, and hillside pastures, fields of an overwintered green crop, maybe turnips, and yellow charlock, or possibly oilseed rape. It's a typical Evelyn scene, a managed landscape, the Covenant at work, the Creator's gift, a landscape worked and loved in equal measure, Evelyn's Kentish interpretation of the land God promised to the sleeping figure of Jacob.

The left hand hillside is thickly wooded and unremarkable, but the hill on the right, with its hanging beech woods, is entirely typical of the North Downs about Wye. Staple Farm, Hastingleigh, lies on the Downs, on just such a wooded hill as Evelyn has painted. A few days after my visit, while out gathering pea-sticks in the beech woods with Roger in the early evening of May 12th, 1960, Evelyn suddenly collapsed and died.

* * *

Some weeks after Evelyn's death Roger set about disposing of her remaining work. Perhaps realising that Jacob's Dream, with its uncomfortable resonances, could not easily be given away to friends or family, he decided to sell it. The painting is unsigned, but the label on the back, in Roger's handwriting, reads:

Jacob's Dream

30 gns

Evelyn Dunbar

(Administration)

Staple Farm,

Hastingleigh,

Ashford, Kent

Evelyn Dunbar Jacob's Dream verso, with sale label written by Roger Folley.

30 guineas (£31.50) in 1960 works out at about £750 in 2022. Jacob's Dream sold into private ownership, and was lost to view for many years. I had the good fortune to see it again in November 2011, a proud and wonderful moment.

Thanks to Jane England for help in the preparation of this commentary.

(Original text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2022. All rights reserved.)

Further reading...

EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING

by Christopher Campbell-Howes

is available to order online from:

customerservices@scriptps.co.uk

448 pages, 301 illustrations. RRP £30

Tuesday, 30 April 2013

Christmas Cards 1956-59

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1956
© Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection

Maybe the title of Evelyn's and her husband Roger's Christmas card for 1956, not one of their best, speaks - rather obscurely - to all who have ever been pushed to finish their Christmas mail on time:

Eleventh Hour

Time presses: that's the modern slant
On doing only what you want.
Comes Christmas: here's the need to grant
A waiver for the expectant.
Conspirators that subjugate
Submit to man's apostolate.

The card, showing a man, probably Roger, deep in thought, and Evelyn has added 'What greeting from R and E?

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1957
© Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection

All that remains of their 1957 card is the sketch Evelyn made to accompany Roger's verse, which refers to one of his professional visits to the Caribbean as a member of HM Government's Commission to the Citrus Industry:

White is the skin and white the sand
that burns beneath the sun
Brown is the earth and brown the hand
that nurtures everyone
white-and-brown are the eyes that scan
the destiny of man

I've remarked before before how useful these Christmas cards are to the biographer. In the summer of 1957, while Roger was in the Caribbean, Evelyn was working sporadically at Bletchley Park Training College on an abortive mural project, which was later downsized to the Alpha and Omega panels. Among the pressures that led to Evelyn downsizing this project was that their lease on The Elms, where they had lived since 1950, was due to expire before the end of the year.

Under pressure, and with Roger still on the other side of the Atlantic, Evelyn opted for a modern house in the village of Wye, formerly a vicarage. I remember discussing with Evelyn what they should call it. We made a list of more or less fanciful words reflecting the red-brown brick colour of their new house: 'sinoper', 'bole', 'russet', 'madder' (fairly quickly crossed out), 'reddle', and more. Eventually - maybe Roger called time on this - they settled for 'tan', and Tan House it became. They weren't happy there: 'It was our one mistake,' Roger recalled in Evelyn Dunbar: The Husband's Narrative, the unpublished account of their marriage which he produced in 2007, the year before he died. 'Strangely, we did not flourish there.'

By 1958 Roger and Evelyn, having realised the limitations of Tan House (where there was no studio), moved to a farmhouse called Staple Farm, some 300' (90m) up on the North Downs a few miles from Wye. Here there was a studio, perhaps the best she ever had.

Evelyn's drawing shows a winged figure holding up a scroll featuring all the houses they had lived in together. At the top is Vyner's Cottage, Long Compton, Warwickshire; next down is The Manor House, Enstone, Oxfordshire (these two appeared on their Christmas cards for 1945 and 1949 respectively); then, having moved to Kent, The Elms, Hinxhill, which now looks like this:

The Elms, Hinxhill. Evelyn's studio was between the front door and the conservatory, which she and Roger called the 'vigne'. This was where my portrait was painted in 1954. The conservatory appears to have been replaced and enlarged since then.

Then Tan House, a modern single storey house. Evelyn has very cleverly included in her vignette the Wye Crown on the hill behind the house. This is the outline of a crown cut in the chalk of the North Downs, which I believe was done to commemorate the accession of Edward VII in 1902. It's a well-known feature of the area.

And finally, at the foot of the scroll, Staple Farm, Hastingleigh.

Roger's double-rhymed verse, Chez Tous, mentions features of all the houses they'd lived in together:

Roofs of thatch, roofs of slate,
Lift the latch, come back late,
Walls of brick, walls of stone,
Cut bread thick, gnaw a bone;
Floors of wood, floors of tile,
Change the mood, drop the smile,
Ceilings high, ceilings low,
Needles ply, watch a show;
Helios, Mister Therm,
Play the boss, loose the perm;
Boulevards, country lane,
Show your cards, spare the cane;
Central heat, open fire,
Toast the feet, then retire;
Tile-hung or white stucco....
Homeward for rest we go.

This was the last Christmas card Roger and Evelyn sent jointly. By the following May she was dead. Roger's double-sided verse is reflected in Evelyn's dark and quite obscure double-sided image. The left side shows two 11- or 12-year-old boys teetering on walls or rolling and piling logs, which presumably Roger has cut with the saw on the extreme right of the image. On the right, the same two boys are shown inelegantly asprawl on the hearthrug in front of the large open fire at Staple Farm.

We've met both these boys before: the dark-haired lad stooping over a log on the left is Roger's and Evelyn's nephew (and my half-brother) Richard, and the other is Barry Paterson, one of the two boys whom Evelyn enjoyed taking in from time to time during the last two years of her life from the Caldecott Community, a nearby children's home. Two years earlier Barry had been the model for Alpha in Evelyn's Alpha and Omega panels for Bletchley Park Training College.

Roger's verse reads:

INTERCHANGE

See them outside, bole and boy,
Crumbling, tumbling,
Idle; vital.
See them inside, boy and bole.
Cumbent, lambent,
Lazing; blazing.
Change of place reverses role,
Restful, zestful boy or bole.