Joseph in Prison (1949-50)

Joseph in Prison 1949-50 Oil on canvas 46 x 36cm (18" x 14") Photograph reproduced by kind permission of Woolley and Wallis

It's always a very special moment when a long-lost painting of Evelyn's appears out of the blue. The moment becomes more special when the painting in question is one of a set or group, and the event takes on a yet greater significance when the painting hasn't been seen publicly for the best part of 70 years.

Evelyn, a committed Christian Scientist, knew parts of the Bible well, especially the Old Testament. Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament, consists largely of narratives, some would say foundation legends, rich in truths if not in truth, of the origins of the Jewish people. Indeed, Joseph's father Jacob had the alternative name Israel, indicating fatherhood of his people.

Joseph had a particular appeal to Evelyn. Last-born but one, he was his father's favourite, to the annoyance of his many brothers. He's probably best known for his famous coat of many colours, a present from his father, a gift translated into popular 20th century musical idiom by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber as his Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Joseph had a propensity for the interpretation of dreams. Two youthful dreams suggested his superiority over the rest of his family, something hardly likely to endear him to his siblings.

There were echoes of this to some extent in Evelyn's family situation. At certain times in her career she felt something of a cuckoo in the nest of a family of Kentish shopkeepers. (She refers to herself as such in her 1937/38 allegory April.) Kindly and welcoming people though her Dunbar siblings were, they sometimes found it difficult to come to terms with an artist sister who, despite several years of professional training, earned next to nothing, received very few commissions, lived at home and subsisted on handouts from her father's and her wealthy uncle Stead Cowling's estates. Her mother Florence, an amateur artist, defended her stoutly at home, and it may well be that Evelyn felt her own situation just as sharply as her siblings. Indeed, Evelyn later referred to 1937/40 as her crisis years.

 

Towards the end of 1937 she separated from Charles Mahoney, her former Royal College of Art tutor and later colleague and lover. A miscarriage deepened her depression and her future as an artist looked very bleak indeed. It was at this time that the idea of a series of paintings illustrative of the career of Joseph came into her head.

Joseph's Dream 1938-43 Oil on canvas 46 x 76cm (18" x 30") Photograph: Cambridgeshire County Council. Private collection

The first of what eventually became a trilogy was Joseph's Dream, a diptych or two-panel painting showing the adolescent Joseph in some perplexity confronted by his twin dreams of his brothers and parents bowing in homage before him, firstly in the form of sheaves of corn and then as the sun, moon and stars. Joseph's Dream was unfinished at the outbreak of World War 2 in 1939, by which time Evelyn had all but forsaken painting and was working behind the counter in her sisters' haberdashery shop on Rochester High Street.

Everything changed for her in 1940. Through the intercession of friends in the art world, particularly Sir William Rothenstein, she was gazetted as an official war artist. Then, during an early posting to paint trainee Land Girls at Sparsholt Farm Institute, near Winchester, she met Roger Folley, formerly an agricultural economist but at that time an RAF officer. They married two years later. With Roger's encouragement and - by his own account - help in modelling Joseph's figure but not his face, Evelyn completed Joseph's Dream in time for exhibition with the New English Art Club in 1943, where it attracted a favourable press reception but remained unsold.

After the war Evelyn and Roger settled down to their first taste of extended married life, firstly in Warwickshire and later in Oxfordshire when Roger obtained a post at Oxford University Agricultural Research Institute. So began the most productive and inventive period of Evelyn's career. Away from her family (Florence had died in 1944) the tensions that underlay Joseph's Dream disappeared, giving place to wider and maybe nobler visions of reconciliation, among them the conviction, given the biblical Joseph's later history, that one day she would be worthy of them.

In the Genesis story, Joseph's brothers had been extraordinarily hostile to him and would have murdered him if Reuben, the eldest brother, had not intervened. He proposed instead that they should rob Joseph of his many-coloured coat, smear it with goat's blood to suggest to their father Jacob that he had been killed by a wild beast. The brothers would then push Joseph into a deep pit, where he would certainly die. I hasten to add that this is not in any way to imply, of course, that the Dunbar siblings harboured murderous designs on their youngest sister.

Where did the image of Joseph's pit come from? One of the more unexpected of Evelyn's pastimes was rock-climbing, something she learnt from Roger, himself an experienced cragsman and fell-walker. One of their many rucksack-and-climbing-boot expeditions took them to Gordale Scar, a deep and forbidding ravine near Malham in North Yorkshire. The immediate visionary trigger that fused Joseph's pit with Gordale Scar isn't known, but the result was Joseph in the Pit, painted in 1947.

 Joseph in the Pit 1947 Oil on canvas 46 x 26cm (18" x 10") Photograph Petra van der Wal ©Christopher Campbell-Howes Private collection

Back to Genesis: in fact Joseph survived. Some of his brothers hauled him out and sold him to a band of passing nomads, who took him to Egypt, where they sold him as a slave. He was bought by Pharaoh's captain of the guard, a man called Potiphar. Attracted by Joseph's manly bearing, Potiphar's wife attempted to seduce him. When Joseph refused her advances, her lust turned to anger. She accused him of attempted rape and Joseph was thrown into prison.

So the third of Evelyn's Joseph trilogy is Joseph in Prison. Joseph has proved himself an able and trustworthy man to the prison governor, who gives him certain responsibilities. Among them is care of his fellow-prisoners, who include two of Pharaoh's close servants, his chief butler and chief baker. We aren't told why they were in prison, simply that Pharaoh was 'wroth' against them.

(Image as above, reproduced for ease of reference)

Sharing the same cell, each had a disturbing dream. The Genesis account goes on (Chapter 40, verse 6) 'And Joseph came into them in the morning, and looked upon them, and, behold, they were sad'. Here we are plunged into the actuality of Evelyn's Joseph in Prison. Joseph, the central figure in red, has opened the cell from the outside - evidence of his trustworthiness - to give breakfast of sheep's milk or something similar to the two inmates. Through the window dawn is breaking. Joseph, seen from above and in quarter profile, has a strong resemblance to Roger Folley. What is happening?

Later they recount their dreams. Joseph interprets them: for the butler it means release and a return to his former royal duties, but for the baker it means death. And so it turns out. Eventually Joseph's dream-prowess reaches Pharaoh's ears: he too has had a dream, which Joseph interprets as meaning that seven years of plenty would be followed by seven years of bad harvests and famine. And so it comes to pass. Joseph becomes Pharoah's right hand man, in charge of agricultural management and the storage of corn in years of plenty and of its distribution in time of famine. The predicted famine is universal. The now aged Jacob and his sons come from their land of Canaan to find corn. They apply to Joseph: they do not recognise him in his Pharaonic grandeur, even less - perhaps hardly surprisingly - from his new name, Zaphnath-Paaneah, supposedly meaning 'the god speaks: man lives'. (He is known as Aziz in the Koranic version of this story.) But Joseph recognises them, and after some vetting he allows them corn in plenty. He has become the provider for his people, reconciliation is complete, and maybe Evelyn has proved herself worthy of her family.


A strong and constant thread running through Evelyn's work is the contract, or covenant, or promise, that the Creator will provide the means for mankind to survive and flourish in exchange for mankind's undertaking to look after creation with intelligence, industry and love. The notion is most simply expressed in the early Genesis creation legend of the Garden of Eden, given to Adam and Eve 'to dress it and keep it'. When Evelyn was painting Joseph in Prison, Roger - in any case a keen gardener - was working at the Oxford University Agricultural Research Institute. In 1950 he was appointed to the Economics Department of Imperial College, London, at its agricultural campus in Wye, Kent, where he became a leading horticultural economist with a worldwide reputation in certain areas.

 

Would it be over-fanciful for Evelyn to equate, compare or identify Roger with the biblical Joseph? It's true that in other images (e.g. Autumn and the Poet)  Evelyn has vested him with the mantle of one who, through his intellectual work, kept his side of the Creator's bargain and its promise of provision. In 2023 a sketch turned up from the Hammer Mill Oast collection, the vast quantity of sketches, studies, juvenilia and unsold or minor work stored in her studio at her death and covering her entire career.

 

Sketch for Joseph in Prison 1949 Pencil Photograph ©Liss Llewellyn Private collection

 

Here Joseph's head is scumbled as though with a not-very-clean eraser or even a damp finger, while a little to the right two heads in profile appear. Both are of Roger, the upper more worked than the lower, exactly of the scale and direction of look were it to replace the head of Joseph. (An orphan female face appears in the lower right-hand corner, through a quasi-spider's web of scribbling. I don't think it can have any connection with the ongoing business. It was just Evelyn's habit to allow herself to be sidetracked in her sketches.)

Joseph in Prison was exhibited in Oxford in 1949 or 1950, where it was sold to Lionel Herbert, a prominent Oxford solicitor. Lionel Herbert lent it back to Evelyn for her solo exhibition at Wye in 1953, since when it has not been seen in public. For me it is privilege to be in a position to show for the first time since 1953 all three paintings in Evelyn's Joseph trilogy.



Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2024

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

Pea Pickers at Ripper's Cross (1951)

 Pea Pickers at Ripper's Cross c.1951 oil on canvas 14 x 18in (35.3 x 45.5cm). Imperial War Museum

In 1950 Evelyn's husband, Dr Roger Folley, who since the end of World War 2 had been working for Oxford University Agricultural Research Institute, took up a new and more rewarding post at Wye College, in east Kent. (Wye College, now closed, 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.

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.

* * *

Thanks to Mr Colin, one time resident of Ripper's Cross Farm, for his contribution.

 

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2024. 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

 

Joseph in the Pit (1947)

 Joseph in the Pit (1947)

 

 

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 found 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 paintings, I believe 7 in all, 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 sometimes 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 enjoyed.

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.

 

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2023

 

Further reading: 

 

 Evelyn Dunbar: A Life in Painting

  by Christopher Campbell-Howes

     is available to purchase at

customerservices@scriptps.co.uk

448 pages    301 illustrations    £30 

Brook from Amage (1959)

 

 Brook from Amage Oil on canvas 1959 Photograph Richard Valencia ©The author Private collection

 

Brook from Amage is among the last landscapes Evelyn painted. It dates from the early autumn of 1959; she died the following May. It's among the most personally revealing pictures from her brush.

 

We're in East Kent, not far from where Evelyn and her husband Dr Roger Folley lived in the 1950s. Amage is the name of a farm standing on the road linking the villages of Brook and Wye, where Roger Folley lectured in horticultural economics at the College. This road runs along the foot of the North Downs, taking in views across arable land and pasture towards Brook, whose tiled roofs and Norman church appear, not very prominently, in the upper left-hand quarter of Evelyn's canvas.

 

Evelyn came late to landscape. Her portfolio opens with a few fairly drab East Sussex landscapes, chiefly around Ticehurst. Ticehurst was the home of her aunt Clara Cowling, with whom Evelyn used to stay occasionally, especially during what she called her 'crisis' years, 1937-40, following the traumatic separation from her lover, Charles Mahoney.  A deeper and more consuming interest in landscape developed late in her career, during the last few years of her life, 1950-60.

 

The title Brook from Amage, is succinct, to say the least. It's also almost unique: only one other landscape has a title given by Evelyn herself, the almost contemporary The Great Stour at Wye.

 

The Great Stour at Wye oil on canvas 1958 Photograph: Richard Valencia ©Christopher Campbell-Howes private collection

 

No other landscape is identified by Evelyn herself. If they have titles, they are bland and generalised, like Sussex Landscape, below, so named by Roger Folley:

 

'Sussex Landscape' oil on canvas c.1938 Photograph ©Christopher Campbell-Howes private collection

 

Wye from Olantigh was so named not by Evelyn, but simply through the tradition of the family that owned it. With Brook from Amage it's as though Evelyn wants us to know exactly where it represents.  

 

Brook from Amage isn't a particularly prepossessing landscape. While it's by no means disagreeable, it's not a scene of great natural beauty, it doesn't tick many of the boxes established by better-known landscape artists. Besides, it's raining, something quite unusual in landscape painting, but we'll come to that in a minute. I don't think for a moment that Evelyn is trying to distract us from admiration of the natural beauty of the extreme eastern corner of the Weald. She wants to tell us something else.

 

Superficially Brook from Amage is a pleasant, unassuming - one might say undemanding - pastoral scene. However, as in so much of Evelyn's work, there are several layers of significance. We might begin with the observation that the hand of man is evident everywhere, from the hedging to the buildings in Brook, from the telegraph poles to the curious tower structure on the horizon in the extreme top left-hand corner. More to Evelyn's point is the neat and organised layout of the fields as far as the eye can distinguish them, their different colourings testifying to rotations of crops and to a healthy balance between arable and stock farming: indeed, in the yellowish field centre right livestock - are they sheep? - are grazing among the residual stalks of harvested cereal. Everything is controlled, measured, productive, in fact 'a landscape worked and loved in equal measure', to quote incidentally a motto I once found, improbably, inscribed into the masonry of a car park wall on the Isle of Harris.

 

***

 

Evelyn arrived in East Kent in 1950, following Roger Folley's appointment at Wye College. To start with they rented a house called The Elms, which stood in an isolated and lonely position a half mile or so from the hamlet of Hinxhill. They had come from Oxfordshire, Evelyn leaving behind an active artistic life centred on the two Oxford art colleges at which she taught, the School of Art and the Ruskin. Although she continued to teach, travelling regularly to Oxford and back, for her the move was a savage separation from the circumstances which gave birth to some of her most mature and significant creation. 

 

Initially she found some relief from the isolation of The Elms in nearby Ashford, where there was a thriving Christian Science community, into which both she and her husband were made welcome. To what extent Roger Folley shared his wife's Christian Science is debatable, but I don't think he had any difficulty in sharing her ideas about what I have called the Covenant. This notion, that the Creator (with or without a capital C, as you think best) gave the earth freely to mankind, in return for mankind's promise to look after it with intelligence, industry and love, pervades Evelyn's work. To me its exact relationship within Christian Science is unclear. It maybe owes as much to her mother Florence as to Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. It's more clearly defined in various places in the Bible, most notably in Genesis, where God gives Adam - and Eve - the Garden of Eden to 'dress it and keep it'. It's also recognised in certain of the Psalms, which leads me to a curious circumstance, if I can be excused from relating a personal reminiscence.

 

In the mid 1950s, when I was in my early teens, I used to stay at The Elms for a few days during most school holidays. I would be woken most mornings by a muffled recitation, maybe lasting ten minutes, from Roger and Evelyn's bedroom next door. The exchanges were regular, as though they were reading to each other, each taking alternate passages. What they were reading was mostly unrecognisable, but in one instance it seemed to me that I had heard 'And thy clouds drop fatness', an expression memorable for its oddness. There was some laughter, as Evelyn and Roger enjoyed the quaintness of 17th century diction, before one of them repeated the line. I recognised it; in a recent scholarship exam I'd had to compare and contrast two versions of Psalm 65, say King James and the Revised Version, in which vv. 10-13 run as follows:

 

Thou waterest the ridges thereof [i.e. the earth] abundantly: thou settlest the furrows thereof: thou makest it soft with showers: thou blessest the springing thereof.

Thou crownest the year with thy goodness: and thy clouds drop fatness.

They drop upon the pastures of the wilderness: and the little hills rejoice on every side.

The pastures are clothed with flocks; the valleys also are covered over with corn; they shout for joy, they also sing.

So it appeared that Roger Folley had been drawn into Christian Science from his Lancashire Methodist background, if only to the extent that he and Evelyn used to read the Bible together first thing in the morning. (I later learnt that they read from a programme of Bible readings suggested by the Christian Science Church.)

This is not to suggest that having read this passage Evelyn packed up her landscape gear and made for Amage to paint the farmland stretching across to Brook. The dates are wrong, for one thing: the painting comes from two or three years after my overheard Psalm-recitation. Besides, at the time Evelyn lived at The Elms: not a difficult journey, a little longer, but far out of step with an important spiritual implication we will come to presently.

But I can imagine that, having been familar for some time with that view and what it could be invoked to express, on one morning in September 1959 she did indeed pack her equipment, easel, camp stool, boxes of paints, sticks of charcoal and jars of brushes and maybe her umbrella into the back of their Morris Oxford Traveller. Her 10-minute journey would take her the two or three miles from her home at Staple Farm on the outskirts of Hastingleigh, a village on an escarpment of the North Downs, down Coldharbour Lane to its junction with Amage Road, along which she drove for a half-mile or so before arriving at Amage Farm. Here below is the view again, for reference purposes, and I can well imagine Evelyn's spiritual joy and uplift on confirming that it reflects those verses from Psalm 65 very closely indeed. But why should she choose a wet morning?

How do you paint rain? More particularly, how do you paint rain in a landscape that doesn't stray too far from the conventional? Evelyn starts with a grey, leaden sky, low rain-bearing clouds that have come in from the North Sea, judging by the way the cattle have turned their rumps towards the incoming weather. She would perhaps have had in mind a quotation from the book of Job - always a favourite with Evelyn - which she used in something from twenty years before, her Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary:

Who can number the clouds in wisdom? Or who can stay the bottles of heaven [...] ? (Job 38, 37; i.e Who can stop the rain?)

Evelyn has few means by which to emphasise the rain, but one stands out. It's surely no accident that in almost the exact centre of the picture she has painted a cow lying down. This cow is slightly separated from the rest of the herd, many of which are also lying down. While there may be no scientific proof that cows lie down when it's raining or about to rain, it's a widely enough held notion to carry Evelyn's point, and to acknowledge that into each life some rain must fall.

* * *

In 2007 Roger Folley, by that time 95, put together a statement entitled The Husband's Narrative. He distributed numbered copies among family and friends, in the wake of a burgeoning of interest in Evelyn's life and work, partly expressed through a 2006 exhibition to mark the centenary of her birth, and partly to redress certain imbalances in popular misconceptions about her, chiefly that she painted little in the post-war years when in fact the opposite was true. 

The Husband's Narrative mentioned for the first time something that had been a closed subject for many years: Evelyn's health and Christian Science teaching. Evelyn died suddenly and unexpectedly in May 1960, aged 53. Roger wrote in The Husband's Narrative:

'Apparently in good health, she passed away without warning or farewell: no bed, no walls, just the clouds. The manner of her death caused much heart searching. Just once she mentioned "I've never felt quite right since we went to the dance" meaning the All Night Ball at the senate House, in 1958. She was not suffering in any way that I could see and I left her to deal with it in her own way: it was not life-threatening'.

How Evelyn dealt with a condition that led to coronary atheroma - the cause of death given on her death certificate - can only be guessed at. Death from coronary atheroma results from a gradual build-up of fatty tissues in the blood vessels surrounding the heart. Symptoms include progressive fatigue, breathlessness and chest pain among others over months. As a Christian Scientist Evelyn would have dealt with this as something of satanic origin, to be treated with denial of its existence, fortified by prayer. It's with great temerity that I make the suggestion that she tried to come to terms with the physical problems, perhaps a temporary crisis that she was experiencing, through her work, in particular through Brook from Amage. Moreover, she didn't sign it, and although the signing or initialling of her work can occasionally be inconsistent, Evelyn does not sign work that is unfinished or, more importantly, work that is a testament to a personal problem or struggle.

The right hand side of Brook from Amage takes the viewer across the fields westwards towards the Great Stour and beyond to the low hills on the horizon, Challock Lees and Eastwell Park. The left hand, south western side is more specific. The eye follows a diagonal line sketched by some foreground foliage (which Evelyn may never have completed), passing a beech or oak still in full green leaf, almost touches the chancel, the eastern end of Brook church, picks up the road leading up Spelders Hill and finishes with a curious building, a tower. What lies beyond, over the horizon, is hidden from the viewer.

But Evelyn knows very well what lies beyond. The top of Spelders Hill turns out to be the end of a ridge. A few hundred metres along it lies The Elms, the house in which Evelyn lived from 1950 until almost the end of 1957.

 The Elms, Hinxhill: Evelyn's and Roger Folley's home 1950-57

It was at The Elms that Evelyn was at her most contented. As mentioned above, it took a little while for her to acclimatise and find her feet, but once settled she embarked on a period of her life during which she produced some of her most remarkable work. (Her studio, with a strong north light, stood between the porch and the conservatory.) She maintained a teaching presence in Oxford, and started taking a few private pupils locally. She played a full part in the cultural life of Wye College, arranging lectures from eminent artists and concerts from outstanding musicians. She designed scenery and sets for the college Drama Club. She enjoyed fell-walking and rock-scrambling holidays in the Lake District and skiing in the French Alps. She provided weekend and sometimes longer accommodation for boys from the Caldecott Community, a nearby children's home. She played a full part in the activities of the East Kent Art Society. She had a wonderful gift for friendship, specifically within the Christian Science congregation and more generally in the local community. She was closer to her family, based in Rochester and Maidstone, than she had been when living in Oxfordshire. 

All these riches were associated with The Elms. Although they continued unabated at Tan House, a stopgap house in the village of Wye before moving in 1958 to Staple Farm, her activities had their full measure at The Elms, where I think she was free of the pain that assailed her progressively from mid-1958 onwards. Brook from Amage is an acknowledgement partly of discomfort-free days over the horizon, and partly of troubles that were current when she sought to combat them through this painting. I suspect that the following lines from the book of Job -

The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. (Job 1 v21)

- were never very far away from her thoughts in her last months.

 Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2023. 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

 

 

 

 

'Maternity buds' (1937)

Maternity Buds (1937) 

 

 

 

'Maternity bud' 1937 Pen and ink on cartridge paper Photograph ©LissLlewellyn

In about 1936 Evelyn started, from not much more than a doodle, to design a personal letter format, consisting of a vase, flower pot or stylised flower bed, from which grew two flowered stems up the sides of the paper, between which she wrote her message.

                

 Designs for personal correspondence, c.1936. Image ©LissLlewellyn

 

Letter to Allan Gwynne Jones, 26th February 1937 (?) Private collection

 

The letter reproduced above is one of the very few in this format that survive. Mostly they are uncoloured, but Evelyn has pulled the stops out to congratulate her first-year Royal College of Art tutor, Allan Gwynne Jones, who became a lifelong friend, on his engagement to Rosemary Allan, a fellow artist. She calls him 'Sir', not because he has been knighted (he never was) but out of a friendly respect. 

As often the case with Evelyn, there may be some decoding to do: is there any significance in tulips, carnations and harebells growing out of a three-year old rose stock? Did Allan Gwynne Jones have a walled garden with one door open, the other closed?  One can only wonder, and maybe wonder at the purpose of such an exercise, but clearly it suited her fancy to vary the flowers and the setting to complement the character of her correspondent or the subject of her message.

By late 1936 or early 1937 it appeared to Evelyn that her relationship with Charles Mahoney, a former Royal College of Art tutor and later lover, was coming apart. She had shared with him their major work to date, the extensive murals at Brockley School in south-east London, which were inaugurated in February 1936. The later mural panels hinted at the autumn of their relationship. Nevertheless Evelyn saw her future in partnership with Mahoney, professional as well as personal. 

Evelyn's letters to Mahoney suggest that he needed some encouragement to take part in their only professional joint venture, Gardeners' Choice, published by Routledge in late 1937 and reprinted by Persephone Books in 2015. It's arguable how genuine a joint venture this somewhat forward-looking gardening book was. As for their personal relationship, the same series of letters carries Evelyn's frequent suggestions for gardens they might develop together, houses they might live in together, places they might travel to together. Eventually she made her top call: to cement the union they should have children together. She made this clear in a series of images, mostly in drawings in her letters, but occasionally in more weighty formats, like the canvas entitled Opportunity, closely examined here. Below is the most evolved of the Opportunity images. The reference to Mahoney is at once clear: sunflowers, as seen in Opportunity's hat and at the top of the ladder, and in many of his other paintings, might well be said to be Mahoney's trade-mark.

Opportunity 1936 Oil on canvas 61 x 61cm (24 x 24in), diameter 53.3cm (21in)

 Photograph: ©Bonhams, by kind permission. Private collection

It seems curious that a 30-year-old woman should need, or feel obliged, to communicate with her lover about their personal procreation by coded drawings. (And possibly more bizarre to work up her sketches into oils, later to be exhibited in public and sold, as was the case with Opportunity above, admittedly after Evelyn and Mahoney had separated.) Perhaps procreation was something Evelyn found difficult to talk about. She may have had a distressing liaison in Germany some years earlier. Maybe it really was easier and less traumatic for her to express herself through drawings. There's no evidence that Mahoney ever saw her early sketches, which amplified an ingenious and original idea.

 

Studies for 'Maternity bud' (1) Pen and ink on writing paper. 1937. Photograph ©LissLlewellyn

In the top left hand corner there are the surround stems, growing out of a fluted bowl and culminating in a crudely-drawn sunflower. Mahoney is being invoked and addressed, through his trade-mark flower. In the centre is a shape perhaps reminiscent - at this stage - of a sheaf of wheat, being held together by a small boy wrapping his arms round it. Various unexplained shapes occupy the bulbous swelling at the top of the sheaf. Moving clockwise, the sheaf gives way in prominence to a roughly drawn peacock, probably another reference to Mahoney and Evelyn's habit of sometimes calling him (with no hint of a ruder vernacular) 'cock' and 'matey cock'.

Further clockwise, the bulge at the top of the sheaf appears to show something quite remarkable: two shadowy human figures, apparently wrapped in a sort of caul. Finally, more detail of the small boy hugging the sheaf. A similar sketch amplifies some of these elements:

Studies for 'Maternity bud' (2) Pen and ink on writing paper. 1937. Photograph ©LissLlewellyn

 Moving left to right, the 'sheaf' is now seen to contain, and to shelter and protect in its folds, a mother-figure centrally with - it isn't very clear - a tiny baby on her left and a slightly older one on her right. The sheaf-hugging boy is shown in greater detail. The fluted bowl is set in a formal garden, with gateposts, a columned balustrade and two attendant peacocks, like heraldic supporters. The stem of the plants, here reduced to a single line, has somehow retained its thorns. 

Finally Evelyn arrives at a version close to the definitive image at the top of this essay:

Sketch for 'Maternity bud' (3) Pen and ink on writing paper. 1937. Photograph ©LissLlewellyn

The same peacocks in their balustraded parkland, the same stem (although without its thorns), the same sunflower insistence, but a little more detail in the human figures contained within the folds of what is now more evidently not a caul, but a sort of prepuce: a mother-figure centrally, babies either side. Perhaps we can now see that the boy gives scale to the phallus he is holding upright and erect. In botany the bud contains the seed: the phallus resembles the stem and the bud. Is she implying that the maternity for which she longed lay at the tip of Mahoney's manhood?  

Did Mahoney ever see these drawings? It's possible that he never did. All Evelyn's known letters to Mahoney are preserved in the Tate Archive, the generous gift of his daughter. Although some letters from the final anguished months of their relationship may have been suppressed, none of the known letters contains material anything like that shown here. This material comes exclusively from the Hammer Mill Oast collection, the contents of Evelyn's residual studio, passed on to her siblings at her death in 1960.

Although Mahoney, in a hearsay and unverifiable remark, replied to Evelyn's urgings by saying children would stunt both their careers, nevertheless he presumably responded to some extent, because in the autumn of 1937 Evelyn miscarried. The authority for this was Roger Folley, the RAF officer and - in peace time - horticultural economist, whom she married in 1942, and in whom she confided when, to her mortification, it was discovered that she was unable to conceive. 

In the spring of 1936 Evelyn left the Brockley lodgings she had rented while working on the later Brockley murals and returned to The Cedars. She saw Mahoney at weekends. Occasionally they went to stay with friends together, notably with Edward and Charlotte Bawden at Great Bardfield, where because of their dedication to gardening they had been for some time nicknamed 'Adam and Eve'. This was the summer of the Opportunity images. It was also the summer dominated by Gardeners' Choice, planning, writing, choosing plants and travelling to see them, sometimes to Evelyn's aunt, the green-fingered Clara Cowling, whose East Sussex house, Steellands, featured in some of Evelyn's decorative vignettes. To work on the book Mahoney sometimes went to stay near Evelyn in Rochester, not at The Cedars, but at 42 St Margaret's Street, not far from the castle and cathedral. We can perhaps dare to hope that Evelyn was happy in that summer and autumn: she and Mahoney were working together on a joint project and the subject of a closer union through children had at least been broached.

Work continued on the book throughout the spring of 1937. Evelyn sketched Mahoney drawing plants that would feature in Gardeners' Choice. Paul, the Dunbars' dog, seems unimpressed.

Charles Mahoney drawing plants in the garden at The Cedars, spring 1937. Unidentifiable plant above; Bergenia crassifolia in the lower drawing

 

It's difficult to establish what happened through the summer and early autumn of 1937. A conjectural succession of events can perhaps be listed as follows, but not necessarily in the order in which they occurred:

*Routledge intend to include Gardeners' Choice in their Christmas 1937 list. Proofs have to be in by September if the book is to appear on booksellers' shelves in good time. 

*Edward Bawden is reminded of his undertaking to write a Foreword to Gardeners' Choice. His much-delayed MS arrives at 42 St Margaret's Street, Rochester, where Mahoney is staying, on September 3rd. It needs considerable editing. Mahoney tells him it has arrived too late for inclusion. (Bawden's text was discovered among Mahoney's papers in c.2010. It was included in facsimile in Persephone Books' 2015 reprint of Gardeners' Choice.)

*Evelyn discovers she is pregnant.

*Mahoney and his brother Jim buy a cottage in Wrotham, near Maidstone, for their mother Bessie. Mahoney, who has been living for some years in a succession of lodgings, including the Hampstead studio Evelyn rented in 1933-5, moves in too. Evelyn has not been told. Her dreams of living with Mahoney are shattered.

*Evelyn and Mahoney have separated. She works overtime preparing  Gardeners' Choice for publication on her own, all in longhand. There is an unknown quantity of re-writing. It is probably this that caused Roger Folley to say, many years later, that 'Evelyn wrote most of Gardeners' Choice'. In any case it was supposed that a greater share of the writing fell to Evelyn, while Mahoney was responsible for most of the plant drawings. As time passes, however, and as more and more drawings of plants featured in Gardeners' Choice appear from the long-lost Hammer Mill Oast collection, i.e. Evelyn's residual studio, it's clear that she drew far more than the modest quantity originally assigned to her.

*In the closing months of 1937 Evelyn miscarries. It's likely that, alone of the Dunbars, her mother Florence knows.

* * *

There's a bizarre little footnote to all this. As mentioned above, Mahoney kept all Evelyn's letters to him. In 1941 he married Dorothy Bishop, primarily a calligrapher. Some years later the Mahoneys' Christmas card appeared, designed by Dorothy. Here it is, shown next to one of Evelyn's Opportunity letters from 1936.

 

 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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

         

Evelyn's Farmers Weekly quiz (1954)

 

Farmers Weekly puzzle chart quiz: March 1954

 

In 1954 Evelyn was commissioned by the magazine Farmers Weekly to contribute to a regular feature called The Farming Year: Farmers Weekly Puzzle Chart. Perhaps they came out every month: Evelyn's is dated March 1954.

 

Competitors were asked to identify each of the activities shown and to indicate at which time of year - Winter, Spring, early Summer, late Summer, Autumn - each might take place. A further five activities, not among those illustrated, were to be suggested by the competitor, one for each of the specified times of year.  Answers on a postcard, etc. It wasn't stated what the prize(s) might be. To the eyes of modern quiz-folk it must all seem rather clunky. 

 

Shown is Evelyn's proof copy of what must have been a double page spread, as found in 2013 among her residual papers stored in a Kentish oasthouse since her death in 1960. If you have the means to enlarge it, well and good. If not, I'm sorry to be unable to reproduce a more legible image. But even in its unredeemed state - one might almost say un-ironed - the pen-and-ink draughtsmanship is exquisite, a culmination of so many of her agricultural images since her time as a war artist closely involved with the Women's Land Army. Indeed, one of her images comes straight from her war years: No. 7 harks back to Singling Turnips, recorded on a Berwickshire farm in the spring of 1943:

 

Singling Turnips 1943 Oil on canvas Photograph ©England & Co. Private collection

 

These pen-and-ink drawings are the last in a short series of farming images. The most extensive was A Book of Farmcraft (Longmans, London, 1942) written by Michael Greenhill, senior instructor at Sparsholt Agricultural Institute, Hampshire, where Evelyn was posted in 1940 to record Land Girls in training. We see the same very careful draughtmanship in some of her illustrations for A Book of Farmcraft, which sold over 40,000 copies.

 

Illustrations from A Book of Farmcraft. (But might one of the questions in the Farmers Weekly quiz feature a certain right/wrong anomaly?)

 

 A Book of Farmcraft was followed several years later by A Farm Dictionary (Evans Brothers, London, 1953). Derek Chapman, a senior instructor at the College of Estate Management in Reading, wanted to compile an entry-level dictionary of farming terms. Chapman knew both Dr Roger Folley, Evelyn's husband, and her A Book of Farmcraft; the circle was squared; Evelyn apparently was very happy to contribute to a sympathetic project emanating from Reading, the town in which she had been born. Accordingly she produced almost 100 small drawings, some done with the same concentration as those in the Farmers Weekly quiz above (see Oast-house in the selection below), others in which her lightness of touch is the foil to some little witticism or joke, as in Lean-to or Smoker below.

 

Copies of A Farm Dictionary, which was the last book Evelyn illustrated, are extremely rare. Occasionally Evelyn's studies for individual drawings, survivors from some 60 years of storage in far from ideal conditions, come up for sale. 

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