Saturday 17 February 2024

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.

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' 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 Land Girls at Sparsholt Farm Institute, near Winchester, she met Roger Folley, formerly an agricultural economist but then 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, and then push him 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 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:

Casemate Publishing | Amazon UK | Amazon US

448 pages, 301 illustrations. RRP £30






Tuesday 30 January 2024

Pea Pickers at Ripper's Cross (1951)

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

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

Leaving Oxford was a difficult time for Evelyn, a wrench and a painful separation, aggravated by the house she and Roger rented, The Elms, being as isolated as anywhere can be in rural Kent. At first solitary and unemployed, she found it to some extent in the Christian Science Reading Room in nearby Ashford. The Ashford Christian Scientists appear to have been an integrated and energetic group, mainly of women of much the same age as Evelyn, who was 44 in December 1950. 

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:

Casemate Publishing | Amazon UK | Amazon US

448 pages, 301 illustrations. RRP £30


 


Wednesday 19 April 2023

Looking beyond the frame: (6) The Queue at the Fish Shop, (7) It weren't me, Miss

 


The Queue at the Fish Shop Oil on canvas 1942-5 Imperial War Museum

In this mini-series of Evelyn's paintings and drawings, in which figures look beyond the frame to some great matter, to something of particular importance, we come to The Queue at the Fish Shop of 1942-5. Excluding portraits, there are only 7 such figures: (1) August, (2) Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing, (3) Dorset, (4) Joseph in the Pit, (5) 'Zacchaeus', (6) The Queue at the Fish Shop, and (7) ...wait and see: Evelyn's little joke. (Or is it?)

Evelyn, in self-portrait, is looking at us. She's impassive, unsmiling. How it would have transformed the whole painting and minimised its impact if she had been smiling! Nor is she angry. (Evelyn never was: impatient sometimes, but never angry.) She's challenging our complacency, maybe our mistrust. Let's explore this in a little detail.

There are certain lines, actual or implied, in The Queue at the Fish Shop. The cyclist is Evelyn's husband, Flight Lieutenant Roger Folley, RAF. If you extend the line of Roger's handlebars (it does no harm to do it with a transparent plastic ruler on a reproduction), if you extend the line of the fold of his fore-and-aft cap, if you follow the line of heads in the left-hand queue, you arrive at the same point: the beginning of the inscription LARGE SUPPLIES OF FRESH FISH FROM THE COAST DAILY. Just at the moment, of course, there aren't any fish at all, and superficially Evelyn is pointing an inescapable irony. But there will be. It's a promise. The guarantor of that promise is Roger, standing for the Royal Air Force and by implication the armed services. It must have been very exciting for Evelyn to cast this mantle on the shoulders of her fiancé: she started The Queue at the Fish Shop to mark their engagement, in February 1942. It was a personal statement. It was by no means a War Artists' Advisory Committee commission.

My thesis in these six - but not the seventh - 'Beyond the Frame' images is that, deliberately or instinctively, Evelyn draws our attention to major themes - death, war, personal tragedy (as in August), religious epiphany (as in 'Zacchaeus') - by giving them an unseen offstage existence, and creating the onstage, on-canvas tension and drama through her characters' reactions to them. The Queue at the Fish Shop, is exceptional in that what is offstage is a guarantee, a promise kept. We aren't so very far, once again, from Evelyn's driving notion of the Covenant, the contract between the Creator and mankind: in return for mankind's love for and care of the earth, the Creator promises endless abundance. It's this that Evelyn, in an earnest stare that some feel uncomfortable to confront for very long, is asking us not to forget.

* * * 

(7) It weren't me, Miss

 Sketch for Land Girls Going to Bed 1943 Photograph ©Liss Llewellyn

Above is a sketch for Land Girls Going to Bed. These Land Girls were billeted in a large country house, probably in or near Wooler, Northumberland. Evelyn included them in her portfolio of images from the Borders in May, 1943. These young women have allowed Evelyn into their dormitory to record them preparing for bed. One might be already asleep, the girl in the bunk below turns out in the final oil version to be applying cold cream to her face, and there's nothing much to be said about the other two girls, one kneeling in front of a chest of drawers, the other sketched in profile in the foreground. In the final version, however, she takes on a character absent from the sketch. Here she is:

 Land Girls Going to Bed (detail)

What is she looking at, beyond the frame, as she tugs her Women's Land Army jumper over her liberty bodice? Evelyn doesn't tell us, but as we should know by now, there's always something else in her work, something hidden, something hinted at, something alluded to, something unexpected for us to discover, we mightn't be far out if we supposed that what the girl is looking at is a supervisor, maybe a warden, asking 'Right, who broke the bunk? Come on, own up!'

Here's the final version:

 Land Girls Going to Bed Oil on canvas 1943 Imperial War Museum

If we look carefully at the lower of the two visible bunks, the side rail, the one close to those slippers, has come adrift. The nearer end appears to rest on the floor, meaning that Cold Cream Girl is going to have a lop-sided night. If we dismissed this as poor draughtsmanship (which we shouldn't have done: artists of Evelyn's calibre just don't make mistakes like that), we've only to refer to her sketch: it's just as deliberate there. What's more, someone has placed that rush-seated chair so as to obscure the broken bed rail. Clearly there's been some larking about. Who bust it? Who was bouncing on it? I don't think the answer is far to seek. However momentous Evelyn's off-stage concerns are, no doubt this was of equally pressing immediate importance to the beady-eyed girl undressing. What do you think?

* * * 

This is the 100th post in this blog, and with it I take my leave of the thousands of readers who have stayed the course since I first started this series of essays and commentaries on Evelyn Dunbar's work in 2011.  Thank you all for your loyalty and support; I hope you've enjoyed reading them as much as I've enjoyed writing them. Best wishes to you all.

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2023. All rights reserved.  

Monday 17 April 2023

Looking beyond the frame (5) '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 has gone to St Luke' gospel, chapter 10, for his account of Jesus' visit to the house where the siblings Lazarus, Martha and their young sister Mary lived. Lazarus doesn't appear in Evelyn's picture: the man on the left is Jesus; sitting on a plaid rug opposite him, enraptured by his discourse, is Mary, who has some resemblance to the teenage Evelyn; in the background is Martha, peeling apples or potatoes in a posture reminiscent of Evelyn's mother Florence that we've seen elsewhere. Jesus has taken his boots off, a standard practice in Islam, one which the Koran shares with the Old Testament, denoting that the place where he is and the context of his teaching is sacred. How much Evelyn knew of Stanley Spencer's casting of scriptural subjects in modern dress and surroundings we don't know, but for Evelyn to do so, in the context of her own home, and possibly including herself, is surely an equally powerful vector.

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 2023. All rights reserved.

  

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



 

 

 

Saturday 1 April 2023

Looking beyond the frame (4) Joseph in the Pit

 

 

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 often 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 loved.

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. All rights reserved.



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

 

 

 

 

Friday 17 March 2023

Looking beyond the frame: (2) Dorset and (3) Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing

 

 Dorset oil on canvas 1947-48 Photograph: Ben Taylor ©The owner Private collection

Dorset is another of Evelyn's paintings in which the subject looks out of the frame. The previous post looked at August, a largely autobiographical image, enveloped in deep emotions. The conclusion was drawn that when Evelyn wants to express something particularly profound, moving or important, the principal figure's gaze is concentrated on something, actual or notional, outside the frame. In all Evelyn's work there are only 7 such images, so the rarity of this arrangement perhaps indicates the importance she deliberately laid on her subject and its implications.

The fascinating back-story of Dorset is told here. Briefly, the figure is based on Anne Garland, heroine of Thomas Hardy's novel The Trumpet Major. She has climbed to a vantage point on Portland Bill, the southernmost point of the county of Dorset, which has wide views over the English Channel. The views are wide enough to encompass and follow the course of shipping up and down the Channel. 

The date is September 16th, 1805, and the time is about 4pm. It's not certain that Evelyn knew this, or even needed to know it, although given the colouring of the grasses about her and the early autumnal feel of the landscape, maybe she has done some homework in the interests of historical accuracy. In fact these details come from a contemporary ship's log: none other than the log of HMS Victory, outward bound from Portsmouth on a voyage that will culminate five weeks later near Cadiz, off the Atlantic coast of Spain, by Cape Trafalgar.

Among the ship's company of HMS Victory are Bob Loveday, whom Anne Garland will eventually marry, Admiral Horatio Nelson and, to square the circle, the captain of HMS Victory, Thomas Masterman Hardy, whom Thomas Hardy the novelist claimed as a distant family relative. Both Hardys were Dorset men.

What the people of Britain - including the fictional Anne Garland - knew in the summer of 1805 was that Napoleon, intent on invading Britain, had gathered a massive fleet of transports at Boulogne to ferry his 200,000 strong army across the Channel. All he needed was the French navy to protect its passage for the few hours it would take to cross the Channel. In Napoleon's words: 'Let us be masters of the Channel for six hours, and we are masters of the world'.

At Trafalgar on October 21st 1805 the French fleet was destroyed. Britain was safe. Part of the price Britain paid for salvation was the death of Nelson, shot by a sniper high in the rigging of a French ship. (In fact Napoleon, ever impatient with the non-arrival of his navy, struck camp at Boulogne in late August and marched off to trouble southern Germany. The whole vast but eventually futile enterprise had been financed by the Louisiana Purchase, the sale of Louisiana by France to the infant United States.)

End of history lesson. Not, of course, that you needed it, but it gives us the background against which Anne Garland, conscious and fearful of great national danger threatening, focuses her gaze through the protective shield of her hands to a point beyond the frame where the great battleship - with her suitor on board - slowly disappears over the western horizon. Thank you, Thomas Hardy, and thank you, Evelyn.

We move on to something curiously similar.

 

  

  Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing 1940 Oil on canvas Imperial War Museum, London
 
Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing was the first of Evelyn's war paintings. Perhaps unexpectedly, it bears comparison with Dorset above. It's another of the very few paintings in Evelyn's output in which the principal subject - seen alone in the final box - is looking beyond the frame, indicating something particularly significant or important. It was very well received by the War Artists' Advisory Committee, to the extent that Evelyn appears to have received a bonus payment for it by order of Sir Kenneth Clark, the WAAC chairman. It was painted in May and June, 1940.
 

At the outbreak of war in September 1939 gas attacks, using the same gases - phosgene, chlorine and mustard gas - as those used in World War 1 were widely expected. Gas masks were issued to the entire British population. Warning, recovery and primary care, particularly in the cities, of victims of gas attack were entrusted to Air Raid Precautions (later Civil Defence), a civilian organisation drawing its members partly from the Women's Voluntary Service, which is exactly what Evelyn's subjects were. By the final frame her principal subject, helmeted and dressed in rubberised anti-gas material probably dating from World War 1, is facing with grim determination the dreadful threat from German poison gas bombing raids...

...which never happened. However, before Evelyn's paint was fully dry the threat of gas had been replaced by something else. In late May and early June 1940 the news was grim. The British army, maintaining a presence in northern France since the outbreak of war, had been outmanœuvred and driven by Hitler's armies to the Channel coast. An enormous rescue operation, overseen by the Royal Navy, evacuated thousands of British, Commonwealth and French troops from the beaches of Dunkirk. Immense amounts of equipment were abandoned. The army was broken. Soon afterwards France fell. The German army lay poised to invade. 

And in the few weeks' interim between Evelyn sketching out her first designs and signing off Anti-Gas Protective Clothing in the bottom right hand corner, there was a change of Prime Minister: the ineffectual Neville Chamberlain was replaced by Winston Churchill. Evelyn has tilted her subject's head in an attitude of defiance and determination, which cleverly allows us to see her face through the perspex of her gas mask. It is this expression which make me wonder if she had seen a photograph of Winston Churchill at much the same time, similarly looking resolutely upwards and outwards towards the national peril.

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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:

 Casemate Publishing | Amazon UK | Amazon US

  448 pages, 301 illustrations. RRP £30



 

Wednesday 8 March 2023

Looking beyond the frame (1): August

 

  August 1938 Oil on canvas Photo Michael Shaw ©Christopher Campbell-Howes Private collection.

 This is August. We've met her before, here. She first appeared in Evelyn's imagination as a line drawing in her Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary:

August 1937 Pen and ink, from Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary

When August was cleaned, some years after Michael Shaw's photograph was taken, several questions were raised, including whether she was looking out of the frame, or whether she had her eyes closed and was daydreaming about events past or, perhaps more importantly, to come.

August (detail)

Is that an eye, peeping out from beneath her Elephant's Ear leaf hat, or an eyelash, suggesting that her eye is closed and that she is deep in thought? In the much sharper 1938 Gardener's Diary drawing, there's no suggestion of an eye at all.

And that garden seat...in the drawing the word '(Au)gust' appears in the iron work of the back-rest; Evelyn has edited it out from the oil version. Not only that: wrought iron garden seats in this general style appear in several places in Evelyn's images from the mid-1930s. Some are associated with the garden at Brick House, Edward and Charlotte Bawden's home in Great Bardfield, Essex, a place Evelyn used sometimes to visit with her lover Charles Mahoney, somewhere with particular significances in the development of their relationship. Here they are together, in a detail from a letter to Mahoney from the winter of 1934-35.

Detail from letter to Mahoney, winter 1934-35. Tate Archive, reference TGA200921 Personal papers of Charles Mahoney

But in August she is a solitary figure, alone with her thoughts and visions. Her erstwhile partner has disappeared.

* * *

August was painted in late 1937 or 1938, at a particularly difficult period of Evelyn's life. We can assume that the Gardener's Diary drawing came first, no later than the autumn of 1937, in good time for the 1938 diary to be on booksellers' and stationers' shelves, and that the painting followed later. The cleaning revealed a certain violence, indeed a savagery about Evelyn's brushwork totally absent from its sister pieces, February and April, that might lead one to believe that at some time in its history attempts had been made to overpaint some of the rawer episodes with a medium that flaked away in the cleaning process. These 'month' paintings, August, February and April, were never disposed of during Evelyn's lifetime. After her death, in 1960 at the age of 53, her husband Roger Folley passed them, together with almost her entire residual studio, to Alec Dunbar, the younger of Evelyn's two brothers. In due course August was assigned elsewhere in part settlement of an unpaid debt.

* * *  

Figures which look out of the frame are very rare indeed in Evelyn's work. In all the hundreds of images which make up her work - portraits are excepted, of course -  there are only seven. All seven, six women and one young man, are in the grip of very powerful emotions.    

Here then is the first of the seven, August, taking the persona of Evelyn/Eve in the Garden of Eden, dressed in the scarlet of lust, forbidden fruit on her lap, the serpent disguised as a garden hose complete with pump, abandoned by her lover...and at this point we might wonder to what grim extent this painting is autobiographical. After an increasingly tottery relationship Evelyn and Mahoney separated in late August or early September of 1937. At that time or a little earlier Evelyn discovered she was pregnant. Early on in her pregnancy she miscarried. Much lay beyond the frame of her actuality. Her past expectations, her hopes for the future lay in ruins about her. Clearly she had much to ponder, eyes open or eyes closed.

 

Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2023. All right reserved

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