'Peeling Apples', c.1922

 

 

'Peeling Apples': Pen and wash, c.1922. Photograph: Anton Liss ©Modern British Art Gallery

Equal portions of chagrin and delight for the Evelyn Dunbar enthusiast: chagrin that such an interesting and revealing image should appear too late for inclusion in available biographies of Evelyn, and delight at the discovery of something new from her juvenilia, especially when it foreshadows, as this pen and wash drawing does, some of the important themes of her mature work.

In 1908, when Evelyn was rising two, the Dunbar family moved from Reading to Kent, renting a short succession of properties in lower Medway riverside villages before moving in 1913 into 244 High Street, Rochester. This was a three-storey weatherboarded house with street-level shop premises and a modest garden behind. From here Evelyn's Scottish father William (seen wearing his hat in the drawing above) carried on his drapery, bespoke tailoring and dressmaking business. Evelyn's mother Florence, seen here peeling apples taken from the cloth at her feet, was an enthusiastic amateur artist - hinted at by the easel behind her - specialising in floral still-lifes who gave her youngest daughter much encouragement.

When Evelyn was 11 she won a Kent County Council scholarship to Rochester Grammar School for Girls, which later counted her among its most celebrated alumnae and named buildings and facilities after her. Her art teacher was George Ward, a gifted teacher who was also closely connected with the Rochester (later Medway) School of Art. Ward's practical teaching can perhaps be seen in Evelyn's sectioning of her image with vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines in the approved manner, preparatory to making a larger image, maybe in a different medium.

Evelyn's scene, drawn when she was 14 or 15, is a rare interior of the Dunbars' house at 244 High Street, Rochester. (The house is still there, or was when I explored the area in 2014, on a raised pavement called The Banks, opposite the old Rochester station forecourt. No blue plaque, however.) We can assume that we're in the kitchen, and that the fire, or more probably the range, has been lit, partly to dry the washing hanging on the clothes horse on the left.

Following Evelyn's left-to-right travel, a constructional device very common in narrative painting probably deriving from the way we read, we see her self-image squatting on a low footstool with her hair wrapped in a towel; it's hair-wash time, and barely visible and loosely defined in the background are her older sisters Jessie and Marjorie washing each other's hair, although which is which is uncertain.

Evelyn's father is just to her left. An intriguing photograph of William Dunbar, possibly contemporary with Evelyn's drawing, shows him as a portly, tallish man of about 60. He has removed his hat for the camera and is holding it in his right hand. Someone, probably Florence, has written 'Lord de Dunbar and his charming daughters' on the back.

 

William Dunbar flanked by two of his daughters, c.1922: Evelyn (L) and Jessie (R). Dunbar family archive.

He appears via Evelyn's brush a few years later in a family group set in the garden of The Cedars, the house in Strood (the trans-Medway part of Rochester) which William bought in 1924.

 

  'The Dunbar Family in the Garden at The Cedars' Oil on paper, c.1928. Photograph ©Liss Llewellyn Fine Art. Private collection.

Evelyn has included the whole family in this quasi-Impressionist study. Central pride of place is given to William and Florence, with their sons Ronald and Alec in the left hand middle ground, balanced by Jessie and Evelyn knocking a badminton shuttlecock about in front of the summer-house and Marjorie, with a bunch of narcissi, playing with the cat in the right foreground. (The features are too indeterminate for positive identification, but as Marjorie was the most fashion-conscious of the sisters and as to my knowledge Evelyn never owned a striped blazer I have made the most appropriate assumption.) Florence is identified with the mulberry tree behind her, not yet in full leaf, as though the branches represent the expanding family of which she might in time become the grand progenetrix. (In fact all but Alec died childless.)

William, who kept hens whenever his circumstances allowed, is offering Florence a handful of eggs. Evelyn has thus shown him as a provider, a sort of enabling middleman between Nature and Humanity. It's not hard to equate the status she has given him with his stance in 'Peeling Apples' above, where he is pointing at the apples he has provided. In both his left hand occupies an almost exactly central position. Is this accidental or deliberate? I wonder.

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2019

Further reading...

  EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING
     by Christopher Campbell-Howes

      is available to order online from:

      orders@scriptps.co.uk

      448 pages, 301 illustrations. RRP £30

 

Senior Sister, Princess Mary's RAF Nursing Service 1944

    

Senior Sister, Princess Mary's RAF Nursing Service Water-colour 1944 Photo ©Christopher Campbell-Howes

Gazetted by the War Artists' Advisory Committee (WAAC) as an official war artist in 1940, Evelyn was first assigned to record the activities of the Women's Voluntary Service (WVS). She had hardly started on this when she was re-assigned at short notice to the Women's Land Army, and her images in this field are among her best known war paintings. In 1941 she was asked to portray hospital services in their wartime guise, and in due course a quartet of nursing paintings made their way to the WAAC. On completion she returned to the Womens' Land Army. 

At the end of 1942 Evelyn had an interview with Sir Kenneth Clark, chairman of the WAAC, who asked her to extend her coverage of the wartime activities of  women's organisations to include two women's branches of the armed services, the army (ATS) and the Royal Air Force (WAAF). The Royal Navy had made its own arrangements. Evelyn felt this was foreign territory to her. She baulked and procrastinated and it wasn't until July 1944, after a patient reminder from E.C.Gregory, the WAAC secretary, that she finally opened her WAAF portfolio, probably after discussion with her husband Roger Folley, then a serving RAF officer. Gregory had suggested that to speed her production up she might try water-colour instead of her usual oils.

The RAF station to which Evelyn was assigned for her WAAF portfolio was RAF South Cerney, in Gloucestershire, which she knew already through Roger's posting there some two years before. She took lodgings a few miles away in Malmesbury for the weeks she spent observing what everyone called 'Waffs' at work and occasionally at leisure. Nothing very much came from her time at RAF South Cerney. The WAAFs were quite unlike the Land Girls Evelyn had come to know and admire. Their occupations were very different, and mostly took place indoors. Interiors rarely inspired her. She found WAAFs neither easy nor rewarding to record in paint. The entire Women's Auxiliary Air Force, a non-combatant back-up echelon to male-dominated aircrew and ground crew units, expressed its ethos in uniforms, drill, parades and the usual military hierarchy of commissioned and non-commissioned officers, all adopted from their male counterparts. All this was new to her. She was not allowed into the more sensitive Operations buildings, where WAAF telegraphists, cryptographers, clerks, messengers, radar operators, air traffic controllers and administrative officers might be found at work. Further senses of distance came from the WAAFs having no occupational involvement with the soil, whereas through her convictions about the synergy between mankind and nature Evelyn could identify with the Women's Land Army very readily. WAAFs had no existence outside the context of the RAF, in which they were totally subservient to their male counterparts, whereas the Land Girls had forged a sturdy independence for themselves, to an unknown extent through Evelyn's and her female colleagues' championing of them, and in doing so had raised large question marks about the role and status of women in both wartime and in post-war society. She may well have been apprehensive of her role, wondering uneasily what Sir Kenneth Clark and the WAAC expected of her. In the event she managed to produce a modest group of paintings to fulfil her commission.

It wasn't a very happy time for her. In later letters to Gregory she wrote 'I must own that the aesthetic mood didn't flourish very vigorously on the Raf station I was at' and '...they wouldn't let me stay on and complete the job at Cerney'. For lack of much else, half her Services portfolio is made up of portraits, some of which were never submitted. One of these was Senior Sister, Princess Mary's RAF Nursing Service, a rare water-colour in which Evelyn has maybe borne Gregory's recommendation in mind. We don't know who she is - maybe a reader does? - and it may be at RAF South Cerney that Evelyn was forbidden to name her subjects. All that we know is that she's wearing a white ward dress underneath an RAF blue tippet decorated at the points with the Rod of Aesculapius, the classical healing wand emblem of medical services, and shoulder boards showing her rank and status. There's an air of calm, confidence and competence about her, so consoling to sick or wounded RAF personnel, or indeed to anyone in need of nursing.

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2018

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

Sacking Potatoes, 1948

Sacking Potatoes 1948 Oil on canvas Private collection

Now, what's this? At the outset I ought perhaps to put up a conjecture alert. Not much of what follows can be proved, and I may be entirely wrong. The main ingredient in my scenario is more-or-less intelligent guesswork. I hope that at the very least it's logical.

Sitting and staring at Sacking Potatoes, a necessary process for any picture for any art commentator, doesn't reveal all that much. It's in the same vein as several of Evelyn's agricultural war paintings, and might be mistaken as such: groups of women in pairs (I can't identify any men) are trailing sacks between them, traversing a field in line abreast picking up potatoes previously unearthed by a tractor and potato spinner. The women are not Land Girls, or they would be wearing some sort of Women's Land Army uniform. They presumably belong to a field labour group hired for the occasion by the farmer. It's hard to determine any logical progression; the middle group appears to be covering the same ground as the more distant group. I'm led to think that whatever the purpose of Evelyn's design, it wasn't necessarily to record a maybe not-very-interesting potato harvesting scene. She had something else in mind. 

Enter Glynn Burton, a former Leeds University fellow-student of Roger Folley, Evelyn's husband, who became a lifelong friend. As it happens, we've met him before, not as an agricultural scientist but as a rock-climbing mouse. Glynn Burton had found his post-war feet working as a researcher and advisor at the Ditton Laboratory, an offshoot of the Cambridge Low Temperature Research Station near Maidstone. In 1948 he completed a book called The Potato: A Survey of its History and of Factors Influencing its Yield, Nutritive Value and Storage. It became the standard work on potato cultivation and is still in print today. He asked Evelyn if she would design the cover. She agreed readily, but I wonder if Burton's request was made before or after he had composed the title. In the event The Potato etc. appeared with an unexciting and quite un-Evelynish drawing of a potato on the cover.

 

The Potato: A Survey of its History and of Factors influencing its Yield, Nutrition, Value and Storage. Original cover, first edition, 1948

We move forward 11 or 12 years. Evelyn died in May 1960. Within two years the house she and Roger had lived in was sold and her entire residual studio of some 800 pieces of artwork was boxed and bundled up and consigned to Evelyn's family. Or almost her entire residual studio: Roger kept back a small quantity of her work, paintings and drawings of which he was fond or which had a particular meaning or importance to him or those about him. Among them was Sacking Potatoes. He kept it until about 1985, when he gave it to an art specialist with a deep interest in Evelyn's work. Why did he keep it? What special meaning did it have for him?

I think Sacking Potatoes was Evelyn's design for Glynn Burton's book. I once printed out the image above and folded it with four proportionate vertical folds so as to make a book cover of it, one fold for the front flap, two for the spine, one for the back flap. It worked almost perfectly. Evelyn's wrap-around design allowed for a central spine and back and front fold-in flaps, with blank space for the publisher's blurb inside the back flap. But...oh dear, that title: 'The Potato' would have worked brilliantly, arranged between the upper and central groups of sack-women, with the author's name below. But not Burton's full 17-word title. Did the publisher cavil at the expense, indeed the impossibility, of threading the title and author's name among Evelyn's deliberately arranged teams of women? Was the project abandoned, living on only as a modest canvas in Evelyn's store and in Roger's memory as a regretted might-have-been? The questions remain unanswered and we shall never know, merely acknowledging the possibility.

Grateful thanks to Agneta Burton and to England & Co. for their help with this commentary.

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2023

 

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