Herculean Potatoes: Hercules and the Waggoner (1933)

 

Hercules and the Waggoner 1933 Oil on paper 18 x 10in (45.7 x 25.4cm) Photograph ©Liss Llewellyn Private collection

In late 1932, when Evelyn was partway through her postgraduate fourth year at the Royal College of Art, she was approached by Charles Mahoney, her mural tutor, with a view to joining his team of recent RCA graduates to paint murals at Brockley School for Boys, a grammar school in south-east London. She agreed readily, excited by the prospect of working on large surfaces, not to mention by the prospect of working with Mahoney, with whom she was soon to fall in love.

Initially the scheme was limited to five arched and slightly recessed panels in the school hall, each measuring 12' x 7' (3.66 x 2.13m). Four of these panels were to be painted by recent graduates, while Mahoney, a noted muralist, reserved the fifth for himself. Evelyn was consulted about the subject matter of the five panels, and came up with several suggestions, mostly with some obvious relevance to boys' grammar school life, but by January 1933 her ideas had been sidelined in favour of illustrations of Aesop's fables. At that stage no one else had volunteered for the project, so Evelyn prepared several studies in case she was required to paint more than one panel.

She entitled one of her studies Hercules and the Waggoner, which tells of a waggoner whose tip cart breaks down: the waggoner calls on Hercules to use his fabulous strength to re-mount the wheel, only to be told from on high that the gods help those who help themselves and that the waggoner should put his own shoulder to the wheel before calling on divine intervention. Evelyn's design includes several vignettes: the waggoner and his broken-down cart with its load of spilled cabbages or turnips; the horse taking advantage of the halt to browse among the wayside verge; an unscathed cart farther up the lane; some women working in a ploughed field and pointing upwards at the Olympian apparition; in the top right-hand corner - often Evelyn's preferred position for something surprising and challenging - a road lined with telegraph poles, taking us a long way from ancient Greece and slap-bang into the present; and in the top left-hand corner, directed by a farmer in gaiters and billycock hat, some women planting potatoes. Another anachronism, of course: by the time potatoes were introduced into Europe, the Olympian gods and goddesses must surely have worn out their pension books.

Evelyn did her homework. A letter dated 'January 22nd, 933' (!) to Oliver Simon is one of several preserved in the Cambridge University Library. Oliver Simon, nephew of the RCA Principal Sir William Rothenstein, lived in Hampstead, not far from Evelyn's student lodgings. His and his wife Ruth's dining table, at which Evelyn was a frequent guest, was known as a lively hub of young artists, particularly those from the Rothenstein stable. She wrote:

This morning I drew out of doors at a farm on the top of the hill. I am making drawings of tip carts [...] for my decoration design. The farmer is a silent but kindly man, who has carts pulled out for me when I want. Everything looked so lovely today in the winter sunshine. I walked across a huge ploughed field in one of the ruts newly made, it felt so strange in the middle, like being at sea!

Evelyn's letters were usually illustrated, and this one is no exception. To make her point she has added a little drawing of herself as not much more than a black dot among the ruts of a field whose outline surely has a bearing on the other ploughed fields in this little group:

  We move forward nearly 90 years, and the discovery of a curious canvas, of impeccable provenance if not the loveliest piece Evelyn ever painted. It looks as if Evelyn has scraped most of the paint off. The design is almost exactly that of the vignette of women planting potatoes in Hercules and the Waggoner. There's a faint irregular black line scrawled across the canvas, and we may wonder what purpose it serves. It seems to echo in some way the construction, the design of the group of women, and especially the trees and building in the background…

 'Potato Field' 1933 Oil sketch on canvas Photograph ©Liss Llewellyn

 …and then suddenly, like an optical illusion clicking into place, if the faint black line between the farmer and the women is turned to the vertical, and the whole image is turned anti-clockwise through about 30°, the background shifts to the left, hiding some of the woodland, and opens up to the right, and Evelyn's sketch turns into something else:

Women Planting Potatoes 1933 Oil on board 4½ x 4½in (11.4 x 11.4cm) Private collection

After Evelyn's sudden and untimely death - she was 53 - in 1960, most of the 800-odd artworks left in her studio were consigned to the care of her Dunbar siblings. Her husband, Dr Roger Folley, kept several pieces back, however, and among them was Women Planting Potatoes, an appealing little painting, almost an ikon, measuring a mere 4½ inches square. It had no title, so Roger simply called it Women Planting Potatoes. He kept it for many years before giving it to someone with a special interest in Evelyn's work.

Was this the ploughed field, minus the women and the silent but kindly farmer, across which Evelyn had walked on the morning of January 22nd 1933? (A Sunday, as it happens, so it would have been unlikely that the women were working.) It seems reasonable to assume that Women Planting Potatoes is contemporary with Hercules and the Waggoner. It's as instructive to see Dunbar's procedure in the deployment of these images as it is disappointing to know that Hercules and the Waggoner was never used.

I am very grateful to Neil Wells for his contribution to this essay.

 

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2021

 

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

Oxford (c.1951)

             Oxford c.1951 Oil on paper Signed 'ED' Photograph: Sim Fine Art. Maidstone Museum and Bentlif Art Gallery

In 1948 Faber and Faber brought out Robert Graves' The White Goddess. This was a collection of writings, drawn from many sources, in which Graves attempted to rationalise the concept of a super-deity in the thought and imagination of peoples of Europe and the Near East. He recognised the need of people from the earliest times to invent or imagine a force, a presence, a deity responsible for the creation of the world and everything in it, and its subsequent rule. The notion was far, far older and more deeply rooted in the Western psyche than anything in the Bible, the Koran, the Norse gods and their Greek and Roman counterparts, and this presence, this immanence, this super-deity was, and had to be, female. It isn't known whether Evelyn had read The White Goddess, but she was certainly aware of the concept.

In 1948 Evelyn was living with her husband Roger Folley at the Manor House, in Enstone, a village a few miles north of Oxford. The post-war 1940s were among the happiest and most productive years of her life. Roger was working at the Oxford University Agricultural Research Institute, engaged in research that would lead to the publication of his classic Economics of a Fruit Farm two years later; Evelyn was teaching at the Oxford School of Art and at the Ruskin, part-time in both cases, giving her a generous platform for professional and aesthetic cross-fertilisation with her colleagues, some of them distinguished artists whom she had known and kept up with since her student days at the Royal College of Art fifteen years and more before. She also had time to develop her own work.

I expect that it was from this period that the family - Dunbar, Folley, Campbell-Howes - notion originated,  a notion half teasing, half perhaps with a slight sense of exasperation, that Evelyn's female figures were always grotesquely tall and had tiny heads. It wasn't universally true, of course, but maybe there was a grain or two of justification. It was during this period, for example, that the figure of Autumn first appeared in Evelyn's sketch books, later to achieve maturity in Autumn and the Poet. Here she is:

                                        Detail from Autumn and the Poet 1958

In 1948 or thereby she had two other female figures on her easel, firstly the very fine Dorset:

                        Dorset 1947-48 Oil on canvas Photograph: Ben Taylor Private collection

- and then the elusive map-drawing Mercatora, for which I have only a photocopy of a monochrome photo:

                                           Mercatora 1946 Originally oil on canvas. Now lost (?).

(As far as is known Mercatora hasn't been seen for 70 years. The last known reference to it is in a catalogue of an exhibition of paintings by Ruskin staff, dated 1950. It was priced at 25 guineas. It must be somewhere! If anyone can shed any light please contact me via the Comments box below, or by the email disclaimer address.)

One of the chief and noblest characteristics of Evelyn's war painting was her largely hidden and unnoticed promotion of women's interests, a proto-feminism whose individual impact is impossible to assess, but when taken in conjunction with all the other feminist initiatives of the post-war period is surely not without some weight. The three larger-than-life figures so far - I'll come to Oxford in a moment - variously control birth, life, death and regeneration in the context of the rolling seasons (Autumn), guarantee the inviolability of England (Dorset) and map the earth, thereby exercising a measure of control over it (Mercatora). Evelyn does not assign any of these functions to men.

In 1950 Roger Folley left Oxford, having been appointed lecturer in Horticultural Economy at Imperial College, London, at their Wye College campus in east Kent. I think Evelyn deeply regretted leaving Oxford, where she felt she had flourished, and having to come to terms with rural, not to say bucolic, Kent. They moved into a house called The Elms, which stood almost isolated on a ridge near the tiny and ancient settlement of Hinxhill, a place at some distance in many respects from Oxford, burgeoning and quick with learning and the learned.

In 1950 another literary event involving Robert Graves took place: Penguin Classics published his translation of Marcus Apuleius' The Golden Ass, a long, picaresque and often raunchy novel written in Latin in about 170AD. It was the first translation for some 40 years: two translations from the 1900s had been categorised as with 'the dirty bits left out' and 'the dirty bits left in the original Latin'. It's unlikely that either - or indeed any - version found a place on the Dunbar family bookshelves, but Evelyn and Roger had a copy of Robert Graves' translation, in the famous Penguin Classic paperback livery (for Latin translations) of white with purple margins, and eventually that copy found its way on to my bookshelves. I have to say, though, that unlike some of the literary allusions in her work, she never spoke to me about it.

For all its frequent barrel-scraping The Golden Ass is a deeply religious book, with death, redemption and rebirth as its underlying theme. Through inept meddling in the black arts the hero, Lucius, inadvertently turns his body into that of a donkey, while retaining his own mind. After a string of uncomfortable adventures he realises that there is only one power capable of turning him back, the goddess Isis. He addresses a heartfelt prayer to her and she makes herself visible to him.

Here is Evelyn's Oxford again, for reference:

Lucius describes Isis' appearance fully, her immense stature, her long hair, her golden tunic with white collar, her red skirt, her slippers, her blue-black mantle. She introduces herself to Lucius as Mother Nature, Woman, mistress of the elements, the first, the only and original deity. She is known by many names, she says, Artemis, Aphrodite, Proserpine, Ceres, Juno and many more, but her real name is Queen Isis. She makes a condition: if Lucius wishes to be re-created into his original human shape, he must dedicate himself to her service until his last hour. Lucius accepts and resumes his comfortable human shape. 

(We have frequently come across this notion before in Evelyn's work, or something very similar: the same promise of an endlessly abundant and bountiful Creation, in return for the same devotion to it and its Creator - or Creatress, in this case. It was a very powerful concept in Evelyn's mindset.)

Who is the figure in Evelyn's Oxford? I think she begins Oxford from the convenient premise of a visual pun: the river in the foreground is the Isis, as the Thames is sometimes known as it flows through Oxford, and the lanky figure sitting in its watermeadows can only be its eponymous deity. It has to be Queen Isis: Evelyn's figure and her clothing exactly matches Apuleius' description, and if this is deliberate the date of painting can be defined as sometime after the 1950 publication of Robert Graves' translation of The Golden Ass.

Evelyn has had to compromise with her figure to extend her lap and thighs to accommodate a maquette of Oxford University, placed adjacent to her womb as if to suggest its origin, and thereby assuming the role of mother and protectress. In 2021 a sketch was discovered which shows Evelyn organising this compromise by distorting her squaring-up:

Sketch for Oxford c.1950 Photograph ©Liss Llewellyn

The dreaming spires of Oxford are only vaguely identifiable. In another visual pun the outer coat of Isis' mantle is of Oxford blue. Raised in protection of her creation, the angle of this mantle and that of her right forearm echo the shape and endorse the purpose of the spires below, themselves conceived by their mediaeval architects as fingers pointing to heaven. In the shadow of one of those spires Roger is working - or had been until very recently when Oxford was painted - in the Agricultural Research Institute. In the background there are the same neat orchards, trim hedges, carefully husbanded farmland we find so often in Evelyn's landscapes. Ploughed fields, Evelyn's symbol of promise, take up the middle distance. Low hills, possibly Hinksey and Cumnor, lie on the horizon. 

* * *

   Evelyn Dunbar Margaret Iliffe, née Goodwin c.1933 Pen and wash Private collection.

Evelyn gave this painting to her friend Margaret Iliffe. As Margaret Goodwin, she and Evelyn had been fellow students and close friends at the Royal College of Art. Although - unusually - Evelyn has signed it 'ED', it seems to me that the Oxford above is a dummy run for a more highly finished, canvas version. Some years ago I enquired of various Oxford colleges and institutions if any had a finished version of Oxford, but none did. Perhaps by the time the oil-on-paper version that we have was finished, Evelyn had found her feet in Wye, her nostalgia for Oxford and Oxford life had waned a little, and the final canvas version was never painted. Oxford is now in the Maidstone Museum and Bentlif Art Gallery. Failing Oxford, no more suitable home for it could be found than Maidstone, the heart of the county Evelyn loved.

Warmest thanks to Nicholas Sack 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

 

 

Two late portraits: Jill and Ann Mursell (1959/60)

       Jill Mursell 1960 Oil on canvas Signed 'ED60' Private collection

It's always a red-letter day when previously unseen work by Evelyn makes an appearance, especially when it dates from her most mature years. Recently two late portraits appeared, studies of two sisters, Jill and Ann Mursell, both painted when they were in their teens. Few of Evelyn's portraits approach these late images in their concept, execution and finish, to say nothing of that subtle ability to suggest character. Both these studies rank highly in Evelyn's portraiture canon. 

Evelyn came late to portraiture as a mainstream activity, although her portfolios as a student at the Royal College of Art (1929-33) abound with pencil sketches and studies of her fellow students and - deliciously - the occasional caricature of RCA lecturers. In her late teens and early twenties she produced serious accounts of family members in her studio at The Cedars, the Dunbar family home in Strood, that part of Rochester across the Medway to the west. From leaving the RCA in 1933, when she was 26, until the end of her employment as a war artist in 1945 the only formal portraits are of WAAF personnel. The period 1945-1950, when she lived near and taught in Oxford, is rich in allegorical paintings but not in portraits. In 1950 she and her husband Roger Folley moved to Wye, in east Kent: after 4 years working with Oxford University Agricultural Research Institute, Roger was appointed to the teaching staff of King's College, London at their agricultural campus at Wye College. His time in Oxford was marked by the 1951 publication of his Economics of a Fruit Farm, which became - and still is to some extent - a standard work.

In rural Kent the focus of Evelyn's work changed, moving gradually from allegory to landscape and then to portraiture. One of the catalysts for her renewed interest in portraiture was the arrival in Wye of the portraitist and former RCA student - although several years after Evelyn - John Stanton Ward. Ward and his wife Alison became friendly with Roger and Evelyn, to the extent that the two artists used to enjoy the rather Victorian pastime of going out sketching together in Wye and the surrounding area. It's my unsubstantiated belief that Ward, known nowadays for his endless establishment and royal portraits, taught Evelyn the rudiments of professional portraiture, something that was quite foreign to the deeply un-commercial Evelyn: not the execution, not the actual brush-on-canvas work (I don't think she had much to learn), but the nuts and bolts of commissions, contracts, conditions of work, scaling of charges, delivery dates and so on. 

Meanwhile, a certain Peter Mursell, after a first in agriculture at Cambridge, showed a strong interest in flying but was disqualified from taking the controls because of his poor eyesight. World War 2 found him associated with, and eventually running the Air Transport Auxiliary, a body employing civilian pilots to deliver new and repaired aircraft to RAF units, thus freeing active service pilots. At the end of the war he devoted himself to the expansion of Dounhurst, the family fruit farm in West Sussex. He was faced with a considerable learning curve. While careful to respect local expertise, he also tapped other sources of professional advice, among them the East Malling Research Institute (coincidentally the setting for Evelyn's A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling) and Wye College. The students he occasionally received on work experience and placement were supervised by Roger, whose Economics of a Fruit Farm, which emphasised apple growing, had recently been published.

Roger and Peter Mursell got on very well - but perhaps that should read 'Folley and Mursell got on very well', because in the fashion of the time they addressed each other by their surnames. Almost exact contemporaries, they shared a love of fast machines - in Roger's case, his Norton motor bicycle - and some common experiences in World War 2: Roger served in the RAF, firstly (somewhat to his disappointment: he wanted to fly) in Balloon Command and, after training, as a night-fighter navigator with Fighter Command. By the mid-1950s Mursell, a man with a great gift for friendship, and Roger had become close enough for Evelyn to be introduced to Dounhurst and the rest of the family. 

Evelyn also had the gift of friendship, perhaps in greater measure than the more retiring and self-effacing Roger, but there was something else that drew her to Dounhurst. A devout Christian Scientist, she gave a sharp prominence to the concept that the earth and all that is in it is a permanently guaranteed gift from the creator (with or without a capital C) to mankind, on condition that mankind, from the humblest gardener to the loftiest agronomist, look after it with love, industry and intelligence in return. Among her biblical exemplars, both taken from Judaic foundation legends in Genesis, were Adam, to whom the garden of Eden was given 'to dress it and keep it', and Joseph, whose political control of agriculture in ancient Egypt marked him as a great provider for and saviour of his people. This theme, this promotion of the synergy between nature and mankind, permeates Evelyn's work and makes her one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, whose message is never more needed than today. There's hardly a post in this blog without some mention of it. To some extent in her mind Roger, through his work, inherited the mantle of Joseph. And now here was Peter Mursell, fulfilling the creator's conditions not just in his orchards, but through his growing regional and (later) national involvement in the apple industry. (For his many contributions to regional life, including a spell as Chairman of West Sussex County Council, Peter Mursell was knighted in 1969.)

Mankind-nature synergy may not have dominated conversation round the Dounhurst dinner table in the late 1950s, where the talk maybe concentrated more on Evelyn's preparedness to paint the two Mursell daughters. By chance part of a letter survives from Evelyn to Cecily Mursell (their mother):

 

     Extract of letter (p1/2) from Evelyn to Cecily Mursell, October 1958. Private  ownership

What I am able to respect is your wish about size and your preferences, and Peter's, with regard to the treatment - ie the amount of finesse and incisiveness (am not sure of the spelling of this....) and its suitability for the setting of your house when it becomes a finished object.

As to price - I think I did quote before, but without referring to actual sizes. The scale would be as follows:

approx 12" x 16" - 30gns [guineas]

            14" x 18" - 40  "

            18  x 22   - 55  "

            20  x  24  - 70 "

            22  x  30  - 80 "

(Evelyn's emphasis - 'What I am able to respect' - probably refers to her initial reluctance to accept payment.)

It's not certain when Evelyn started the portraits. The main thrust of Ann Mursell's portrait was probably complete by the summer of 1959, although it may have been started several months before. Ann Mursell, who was then 14, is sitting reading, or reflecting on what she has read, beside a window in a light and airy room. On the window-sill is a ceramic cockerel, a present from her godfather. She recalls not being the most communicative sitter, and not really wanting to have her portrait painted at all. Evelyn worked hard to put her at her ease, and it may be that her apparently pensive expression as she ponders what she has read or has seen out of the window masks a feeling that she would rather be elsewhere doing something else. The skin tones are rendered to perfection, as are the lights in her hair - which, incidentally, she cut herself in between sittings; not easy for a portraitist to deal with. 

Ann's portrait was delivered at the end of September 1959, framed in a James Bourlet frame, at that time Evelyn's preferred framer. The invoice was included. Evelyn's fee was £52.10.0, i.e. 50 guineas.

 

      Ann Mursell (slightly cropped) 1959 Oil on canvas Signed 'ED59' Private collection

Jill Mursell, then 18, followed, completion of her portrait possibly  delayed through her absence abroad. It appears to have been ready in the first months of 1960. Was it a winter painting? Unlike her sister's portrait, there's no obvious source for the light, which suggests artificial lighting. The skin tones and the hair are very skilfully rendered, the texture and subtle shading of her jumper also. The half-smile may be just slightly reminiscent of a certain famous portrait that hangs in the Louvre. 

Jill's portrait, similarly framed, was delivered to Dounhurst in the spring of 1960. The exact date is not known. There was a problem: Peter and Cecily Mursell thought it was incomplete. The lower half of the portrait resonated with unrelieved browns. They asked Evelyn if she could add something to enliven it. She agreed to add a brooch or a necklace, and took the canvas back home with her to Staple Farm. However on May 12th she died, suddenly and unexpectedly, before she could make any alterations. Jill Mursell is among the last, if not the last, of Evelyn's portraits.

The second page of the letter quoted above continues with details of costing:

   Extract of letter (p2/2) from Evelyn to Cecily Mursell, October 1958. Private ownership

"Mary Garland" was 18" x [illegible] 

If the finish was greater & took me a lot longer it might be a bit more, but not excessively.

Our house-purchase is going forward smoothly and the removal date is now fixed for 29th or 30th of this month! So I am beginning to pack already.

It will be wonderful to have a studio again. We shall so look forward to your visiting us when we're settled.

Again thanks for the day. How are the art-classes?? Why not do the portraits yourself?!

Longing to see results

Love to all of you from both, Evelyn

 

Letters like this are pure gold to the biographer. Apart from revealing insights into Evelyn's working practices, her mention of moving house gives the exact dates of removing from Tan House, a very ordinary modernish house in Wye without a dedicated studio, to Staple Farm, a capacious farmhouse on the Downs two or three miles to the south of Wye. Evelyn converted part of the first floor into a studio (with a north light, vital to artists because of the regularity of the daylight) and an adjoining store. Roger and Evelyn spent less than a year not very happily in Tan House. 'It was our one mistake', Roger wrote many years later.

A reader (thank you!) tells me that Mary Garland was the daughter of Charlie Garland, the Wye College Bursar. The family lived in Brook, a village two or three miles from Wye. I wonder if her portrait is still extant? If any reader knows anything about this, it would be wonderful to discover yet another image from Evelyn's heyday of portraiture.

Warmest thanks to the Mursell family for their help with this essay.

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2020

 

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