Zacchaeus

 

  'Zacchaeus' pre-1933 Pen and wash heightened with white on paper Signed 'E.Dunbar' Private collection

I ought to preface 'Zacchaeus' and its fascinating back story by putting CONJECTURE ALERT at the head: what follows is the piecing together of several sometimes quite disparate elements in the hope of composing a convincing narrative. Alas, some of what follows is guesswork - informed guesswork, I hope, but still more conjecture than good scholarship has houseroom for. If any reader knows better or has information to add to the following reconstruction, please leave a comment. I'd be very grateful!

* * *

In about 1922, when Evelyn was in her mid-teens, she seems to have considered illustrating a series of Bible stories in pen and ink, and in contemporary dress. What her purpose was we don't know, but we can maybe assume some project connected with the Christian Science community in Rochester of which her family (apart from her father William) were committed members. Biblical illustration was something that drove her throughout her life: her final completed painting was Jacob's Dream, on her easel in her studio when she died in May 1960. One such early drawing was Martha, Mary and Lazarus:

 Martha, Mary and Lazarus 1922 Pen and wash on paper NS Image ©Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

Evelyn seems to have conflated St Luke's gospel, chapter 9, and St John's gospel, chapter 11, for her account of Jesus' relations with the siblings Lazarus, Martha and their young sister Mary. In the background is the put-upon Martha, peeling apples or potatoes in a posture reminiscent of Evelyn's mother Florence, as we see her here. The man on the left is Lazarus, and sitting on a plaid rug opposite him, enraptured by his discourse, is Mary, who has some resemblance to the teenage Evelyn. What is Lazarus talking about? Here Evelyn's imagination, fortified by her - and her mother Florence's - love of gardens and gardening, perhaps illuminated by Christian Science doctrine, takes over from the gospel. Lazarus has just come back from the dead, having recently been miraculously revivified by Jesus. Lazarus has taken his boots off; not only that, but he has brought his spade with him. Where has he come from? I wonder, maybe with  a gasp of incredulity, if he has come from the Garden? But which garden? Could it be the pre-Lapsarian, paradisal garden, the one from which Adam and Eve were expelled, in the Fall of Man? I move on quickly.

In 1957, towards the end of her life, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford asked Evelyn, who had been teaching part-time in Oxford for some years, for some samples of her work. She chose to donate a couple of family pencil portraits and Martha, Mary and Lazarus. It may be noteworthy that Evelyn didn't sign it.

Was Martha, Mary and Lazarus the only Biblical pen-and-ink illustration in the series?

* * *

In the final months of Evelyn's postgraduate year at the Royal College of Art Evelyn volunteered to join a small team of recent graduates to decorate the hall at Brockley School for Boys in south-east London. She did so at the invitation of her mural tutor, Charles Mahoney. It was a big project, and the work lasted, largely uninterrupted, for a little under three years, April 1933 to February 1936. As the project neared its end, by which time Evelyn and Mahoney had become lovers, she looked about for other projects and commissions. One result of her search was an invitation in March 1936 by Athole Hay, Registrar at the Royal College of Art, to submit mural designs for the interior decoration of some new buildings at the University of London.

To accompany this request she was asked to submit a supporting portfolio of her work, to be delivered to Athole Hay at the Royal College of Art, and this she did. What happened to this portfolio is not known. It seems to have disappeared from the RCA. Having left the RCA three years before, Evelyn no longer had an automatic entrée there, even less after she and Mahoney separated in 1937. There's some suggestion in the Evelyn-Mahoney correspondence, now housed in the Tate Archive, that she asked him to collect it or at least enquire about it. Evelyn was concerned that it shouldn't fall into unauthorised hands. There the story dies until many years later.

It was in 2010 or thereabouts that a very fine pen and ink drawing, rather hurriedly signed 'E Dunbar' in the style she favoured in the mid-1930s, came to light in a document drawer in a piece of furniture once belonging to Eric Ravilious, who died in 1942. When his daughter Anne Ullmann told me about it she had no idea how it came to be there. Although he never taught Evelyn, Eric Ravilious had taught at the Royal College of Art throughout the years of her studentship and thereafter. Evelyn and Ravilious hardly knew each other. The likelihood, but pure conjecture, is that the pen and ink drawing had come from Evelyn's missing portfolio.

* * *

It's an impressive piece of work, of a depth rarely achieved with pen, ink and wash, heightened with white, alive with movement and excitement. Here it is again for reference:

 

This, then, is another in this mini-series of images Evelyn has created in which a principal figure is looking beyond the frame. There are only 7, and one of them, number 7, is one of Evelyn's jokes; this is number 5. It's a technique Evelyn uses to evoke something of great importance happening beyond the frame. Some would say that what is happening here is of unequalled significance.

Clearly something very exciting is about to happen. A star-struck, enraptured girl - could she be the same girl as in Martha, Mary and Lazarus above? - is looking out of the frame at something so blinding, so brilliantly powerful that the girl next to her has to shield her eyes. Other people (I can count sixteen), it seems of all ages, are hurrying to see what's going on, what's happening beyond the frame, who's coming. And two, to get a better view, are climbing a tree, one by ladder and one, not an enormous person, by rope or - it isn't clear - rope ladder, slung from a much higher branch.

Could there be a clue in St Luke, chapter 19? Has Evelyn transported her imagination to 1st Century AD Jericho, clothing her scene in modern dress?

And Jesus entered and passed through Jericho. And behold, there was a man called Zacchaeus...and he sought to see Jesus who he was; and could not for the press, because he was little of stature. And he ran before, and climbed up into a sycomore tree to see him: for he was to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up, and saw him, and said unto him, Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down; for today I must abide at thy house...

But how did this drawing come into Eric Ravilious' possession? Better not to ask, surely. A conjecture too far.

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2025. All rights reserved.

 

Further reading: 

Evelyn Dunbar: A Life in Painting

      448 pages   302 illustrations   £30

               available from:

customerservices@scriptps.co.uk 

 

Rediscovering Evelyn Dunbar: A Life in Art (2024)

 

For your bookshelves:

Papers from a day conference held on 23 April 2023

 

Evelyn Dunbar (1906-60) remains something of an enigma. Where she is known, it is for her role as the only female artist 'salaried' by Kenneth Clark's War Artists' Advisory Committee, which aimed to record wartime scenes for posterity and occasional propaganda purposes. Dunbar particularly excelled in depicting the role of women during wartime; on farms, in nursing, or keeping the home fires burning. A recurrent focus was on women working the land, which keyed into her deep affinity with gardening, the outdoors, and landscape. In response to a growing interest in Dunbar, this volume brings together four papers from a day conference at the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History that illuminate different aspects of her life and artistic practice.

Introduction

Thomas Dobson, Peter Forsaith and Daniel Reed

Scenes from Family Life: Early Promise in the Juvenilia of Evelyn Dunbar

Peter Vass

"All that is made is the work of God": Christian Science as Creed for Evelyn Dunbar and Her Contemporaries

Jan Cox

'With very keen understanding': Evelyn Dunbar and the War Artists' Advisory Committee

Claire Brenard

Alpha and Omega: Evelyn Dunbar's Return Ticket to Oxford

Christopher Campbell-Howes

 

Published by Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History, October 2024

ISBN: 9798342662352 HB

Paperback £9.99   Hardback £14.99  Plus p&p

To order:   https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DJVXVHQZ

An English Calendar (1938)

An English Calendar 1938 72 x 72in (182 x 182cm) Photo: Richard Valencia © Christopher Campbell-Howes. Imperial College, London

Evelyn's final exposition of the month-designs she had originally made for the Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary was in An English Calendar, the largest canvas she had attempted to date. A few of the months are old friends. April - subject of a previous post - is almost unchanged. February, however, has lost her complicit furtiveness, and not to her advantage, while August has lost her previous deeply personal autobiographical elements, the symbols of her desire and its fulfilment have been confiscated and she has become merely a pretty woman sitting on a garden bench and - these things are always important in Evelyn's work - looking into the ensemble of the composition rather than outside the frame. Similarly with some of her other Gardener's Diary precursors. Evelyn originally conceived of July like this:

 July from Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary

This chap is a wonderful July, a hands-down winner in comparison with the unexceptional village-vegetable-show figure in An English Calendar. He has harvested an enormous crop of vegetables, a cornucopia so impressive in its abundance that the outsize sack - it is almost a tarpaulin, not to speak of a conjuror's cloth - is not big enough to take them all, so that he has to hold under his arm the giant cabbage he has grown. So great is the tumbling profusion of these vegetables that their weight has smashed the fence. I can imagine Evelyn hugging herself with delight at the sudden appearance of this notion at the end of her pencil, this image of Nature's outrageous generosity endorsed and expressed as something quite normal by the deadpan and incurious expression on the gardener's face.

 As for September...

September from Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary

...while Evelyn has preserved the vegetable marrows in both versions, there's no doubt in my mind as to which Mrs September, this one or the more insipid version in An English Calendar, has the greater individuality and the stronger identification with the abundance of produce at what is traditionally Harvest Festival time in the United Kingdom. But there's more to it than that...

September from An English Calendar 1938

 

Moving from right to left, we have the same tumble of vegetable marrows, surely an enormous weight to be carried from the shoulder of the woman, who has become someone quite different, someone slighter and younger, little to compare with the comfortable Mrs September of the Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary above. These pen-and-ink drawings were finished in the summer of 1937 or even earlier, in good time for them to be transferred into plates and incorporated into the embryo diary, printed and ready for sale in the closing months of 1937. Who is this younger and slighter woman? Can she be identified?

I think she can. She is Evelyn herself. Moving further leftwards, she is holding a sunflower, partly surrounded by various flowers and trailing stringy roots. The sunflower is a recent deadhead; some petals remain, but the seeds have fallen from the cortex, the dark central part of the flower head. 

 

Throughout much of their four-year association, 1933-37, Evelyn represented Charles Mahoney, her former Royal College of Art tutor and later lover, as a sunflower, partly symbolically and partly as an identifier, because they appear so frequently in his work as to have become a sort of trademark. By 1937 their relationship was beginning to come apart, accelerating as Evelyn began to demand more of him than he was prepared to give. They were two very different people. The relationship could not have lasted: Evelyn  was a devout and committed Christian Scientist from a bourgeois provincial background, Mahoney leaned far to the left, viewing, as many artists did in the 1930s, Stalin's Russia as a promised land. Evelyn had a playful, subversive, not to say impish, and frequently feminist side to her nature, subtly nuancing much of her work, which the sometimes obtuse Mahoney often found tiresome.

 

In August 1937 Evelyn discovered she was pregnant. Mahoney left her in early September. In that month or maybe a little later Evelyn miscarried. An English Calendar carries one or two other images that might be called autobiographical - August, for instance, and April - but here in September Mahoney is reduced to a faded memorial bouquet. The autumn of 1937 marked the start what Evelyn later referred to as her 'crisis years', a largely fallow period characterised by bickering with her family and during which she painted comparatively little, a directionless period marked at its nadir with working behind the counter in her sisters' haberdashery shop in Rochester High Street; crisis years from which she was rescued by her appointment in 1940 as an official war artist and, later, by her marriage to Roger Folley in 1942.

 

* * *

 

An English Calendar was exhibited at Wildenstein's Gallery, London, in the spring of 1938. It attracted favourable press notices, with the exception the Left Review of May 1938, in which a critic calling himself 'Toros' wrote:
  

Evelyn Dunbar showed invention and fancy - rare qualities in these times. But her outlook is thoroughly petit-bourgeois. There is a small-town or suburban atmosphere about it - a contented preoccupation with the little details of life among cabbages and marrows. A larger horizon and subject-matter are required to give a real chance to her very considerable powers as a designer.

'Toros' was in fact Percy Horton, a tutor at the Royal College of Art and later Master of the Ruskin School in Oxford. Evelyn worked on his staff from c.1948 until her death in 1960; they had always been good friends. There's an irony here: I wonder if Horton would have levelled the same petit-bourgeois criticism if Evelyn had not substituted the very strong images originally designed for Gardener's Diary for the much paler and more anodyne figures that ended up in An English Calendar?

An English Calendar never sold, and in 1957 Evelyn donated it to Wye College, where Roger Folley lectured in horticultural economics. For years it hung in Withersdane Hall, the administrative centre of the college, giving rise to false rumours that it was a mural. When Wye College closed down, it was recovered by the parent body, Imperial College, in whose possession it still is.


Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2017; updated 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