Sunday 30 December 2012

Dorset (1946-47)

Evelyn Dunbar Dorset 1947-8 (1' 7" x 1' 11": 48 x 58cm) Photograph Ben Taylor ©The present owner. Private collection

Writing towards the end of his life in his unpublished 2007 pamphlet Evelyn Dunbar: The Husband's Narrative, Evelyn's husband Roger Folley states: 'My sister offered us the use of a vacant cottage adjoining her house at Long Compton. With more pull than push, we leaped at the chance. The Dunbars gave us some furniture, and we moved there, [..] our married life began. Evelyn had her first experience of housekeeping, but her painting was handicapped. The cottage had few rooms, low ceilings and low windows. Nevertheless she made her first portrait and [..] Dorset was sold to a patron.'

The patron was Mary Landale, a student at the Ruskin School of Drawing and of Fine Art in Oxford, where Evelyn taught part-time as a Visitor. In March 1951 Mary Landale's niece, then 15, wrote to her parents from her aunt's house -
Auntie Maydie [the family name for Mary Landale] has bought a picture by a well known artist. It is an allegorical figure of a woman symbolising Dorset (I think it is Dorset) sitting in a background of (presumably) Dorset countryside. It is a lovely picture, very graceful & done in a colour scheme [of] dullish greens.
- which if nothing else suggests that its purchaser bought it for its own sake and not out of any great familiarity with or special fondness for the county of Dorset. Nor is it certain that Evelyn ever went there, apart from one occasion in the mid-1930s when she spent a few days near Wimborne child-minding for some friends. Why did she paint it?


Dorset was lent back by Mary Landale for showing in Evelyn's only solo exhibition, at Wye College, Kent in 1953. I went to this exhibition. Rising 12, I was very much struck by this image, I think falling in love a little with this lovely but slightly troubled woman, unique in Evelyn's work, but apprehensive of raising with her the boyish conundrum that if you asked Dorset to stand up she would be so monstrously tall that the breeze evident in the painting would blow her over. But who was she?

A year or two later, in the course of a conversation about what I was doing at school, I told Evelyn that in English we were reading Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd. She was pleased. For her, Hardy was an important writer, the most elemental of English novelists and one she often mentioned. She told me his The Trumpet Major lay behind Dorset. After a teenage failure to persevere with it, I didn't read The Trumpet Major fully until very much later, many years after Evelyn's death in 1960. There was a sudden, eye-blinking epiphany: Evelyn's hint from so many years before was very loaded indeed. She had done the same with Dorset as she had with so many of the Brockley mural spandrels, where the image shifts from mere decoration to something much more lively and meaningful once the viewer penetrates to the underlying narrative, which may be obscure, not to say hermetic. But why The Trumpet Major? Clearly Dorset - the woman - is a personification: if for Evelyn the spirit of Dorset - the county - was best expressed by Hardy, the choice of suitable Hardy heroines on which to base such a personification is not wide. Tess Durbeyfield? Bathsheba Everdene? Susan Henchard? Hardy is not kind to his women. There is one exception: Evelyn's choice of Anne Garland in The Trumpet Major becomes clearer.
 
Towards the end of The Trumpet Major Anne Garland trudges from Weymouth to a high point towards the extremity of Portland Bill, which she reaches at about midday. From here there are wide views of the English Channel. Anne Garland settles herself and gazes out to sea. Presently what she has climbed the hill to see comes into sight to the south-east: HMS Victory, outward bound on the voyage that will culminate in Trafalgar. On board HMS Victory is one of Anne Garland's suitors, Bob Loveday, whom she eventually marries.

 

Hardy is quite specific about the season ('...at this time of mist and level sunlight...') and the weather ('...the wind is to the south-west...'). HMS Victory passes her and begins to disappear, and as the topmost masthead disappears over the south-western horizon she murmurs to herself a line from Psalm 107: 'They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters…' In a typical Hardy coup de théâtre, someone who has come up behind her unnoticed carries on: 'These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.' The voice is that of Bob's brother John Loveday, the trumpet major of the title. (In fact, according to the ship's log, HMS Victory passed Portland Bill in the early afternoon of 16th September 1805.) Dorset herself is looking out of the frame, to the south-west, the direction from which a watery sun is shining and from which the wind is blowing her hair back, billowing out her robe like a man-o'-war's sail behind her left shoulder. Resting her forearms on her upraised knees, she is holding her fingertips together in an attitude of deep thought, of prayer, and forming her hands and fingers into a symbolic roof of protection. What is she concentrating her worried gaze on? What is she seeing that we cannot see, and whom is she protecting, framed between her fingers and thumbs, at an angle a little below the horizontal, gradually receding from her view and eventually dipping below the horizon, far out to sea? And of course Bob Loveday, unlike his Admiral, survives Trafalgar and eventually comes home safe, and England is saved from the threat of invasion by Napoleon's armies. Whatever echoes of The Trumpet Major there may have been, Dorset stands for protection, emphasised in her figure, in her watchful pose and in the form of her hands.


(Original text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2019. 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
 

Monday 24 December 2012

Christmas 1945

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1945 Pre-publication presentation (?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection


Evelyn's vignette of her and her husband Roger's first married home featured on their 1945 Christmas card. 'Our first house' is added in Evelyn's handwriting at the foot. Exceptionally, there is no literary contribution from Roger.

This drawing - it will enlarge if you click on it - is particularly fascinating for me, because at the time, as a very small child, I lived with my mother at The Old Orchard next door, the slightly higher house to the right of Evelyn's drawing. Although its official address was No. 8, Long Compton, Evelyn and Roger called their thatched cottage Vyner's, after a previous owner. This Christmas card is the only contemporary pictorial record I have of Long Compton.

Evelyn had a rather unsatisfactory studio in an outbuilding, and, love sheds though she did, I'm sure that she missed her old studio in The Cedars, the Dunbar family home in Rochester. There's a glimpse of this studio in Winter Garden: the house, seen faintly to the right of the painting between the trees, has a modest tower with a pyramidical roof. The upper room of this tower, well provided with windows, gave a generous light, especially the north light so favoured by artists, with which a tumbledown rural Warwickshire shed could hardly compete.

 Evelyn Dunbar Winter Garden ?1928-1937 (1' x 3': 30 x 91cm) Tate Britain

All the same Evelyn completed some major paintings during her 15 months or so in Long Compton. One was Dorset, which will feature here shortly. Another was Mercatora, whose location, ironically for a painting about navigation, is unknown. This painting took its name from Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594), the Flemish map-maker whom everyone knows of, even if unwittingly, because he developed a method of representing a three-dimensional sphere as a two-dimensional rectangle. The rectangular map of the world that we are all familiar with is due to Mercator's Projection. According to Roger, by December 1945 an ex-RAF navigator, Mercatora was an allegorical figure representing aspects of navigation. If this short commentary turned out to be instrumental in finding Mercatora, it would be wonderful.

Equally tantalising is the disappearance of another painting from this period, Cottages at Long Compton, which Evelyn exhibited in Oxford in the winter of 1949 and sold for 20 guineas (£21). Was Evelyn's Christmas card drawing accurate? There's no reason why it shouldn't have been, but it was fascinating to come across, while searching the internet for any clue relating to Evelyn's lost painting Cottages at Long Compton, a startling - and much more recent - photograph of the very thatched cottages in Evelyn's drawing.

 Thatched cottages at Long Compton © Stephen Mole Photography

Many thanks to Stephen Mole (whose photographs are much sharper and more splendid than the above reproduction, which seems to have gone through the Blogger mangle, might suggest), of Stephen Mole Photography, for his help in the preparation of this commentary.

(Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2012. All rights reserved.)

 
Further reading...
EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING by Christopher Campbell-Howes
is available to order online from
http://www.casematepublishing.co.uk/index.php/evelyn-dunbar-10523.html
448 pages, 300 illustrations. £25

Tuesday 18 December 2012

A Land Girl and the Bail Bull (1945)

Evelyn Dunbar A Land Girl and the Bail Bull 1945 (3' x  6': 91 x 183cm) Tate Gallery, London

In 1956, 9 years after its completion, Evelyn wrote a short description of The Land Girl and the Bail Bull:

It is an imaginative painting of a Land Girl's work with an outdoor dairy herd on the Hampshire Downs. The bail is the movable shed where the milking is done. Soon after dawn in the early summer the girl has to catch and tether the bull: she entices him with a bucket of fodder and hides the chain behind her, ready to snap on the ring in his nose as soon as it is within her reach - a delicate and dangerous job.¹

With this magnificent canvas Evelyn takes her leave of the War Artists Advisory Committee, the Women's Land Army and indeed of World War 2. Having 'defied completion', in Evelyn's words, it was finished in September 1945, in time for exhibition at the Royal Academy the following October.

A Land Girl and the Bail Bull had its genesis in a much simpler idea, that of recording the morning milking, and especially the pristine, almost secret atmosphere of a very early summer morning, probably some time in 1942, the year of Evelyn's and Roger's wedding. They had no married home. Roger was serving with the RAF. Evelyn, when not following Roger's various postings about the United Kingdom, was based at the Dunbar family home in Rochester. Despite spending little time together during the first three years of their marriage, I think Roger's influence on A Land Girl and the Bail Bull was crucial.

Several months before he died, in August 2008, at the age of 95, Roger wrote what he called Evelyn Dunbar: The Husband's Narrative. He had to dictate this 3500-word account, or at any rate pass his own chaotic typescript for a friend to edit, because towards the end of his life he had grown very blind. It's outside the scope of this essay to discuss why he felt it necessary to leave behind his account of their marriage nearly half a century after Evelyn's untimely death in 1960 brought it to a conclusion. There are two versions, dated May and October 2007. The later version, with some significant additions, is shown below in italics.

May, 2007: When we both travelled, or with an occasional passenger, we used our recently acquired car: a red, open four-seater Jowett touring car. [...] This was the car in which we drove overnight to Sparsholt so that Evelyn could make drawings of the 5 a.m. milking at the bail. (p.5)²

October, 2007: When we both travelled, or with an occasional passenger, we used our recently acquired car: a red, open four-seater Jowett touring car. [...] This was the car in which we drove overnight to Sparsholt, on my initiative, so that Evelyn could make drawings of the 5 a.m. milking at the bail. (p.4)²

and

May, 2007: Not significant in itself, the trip marks the start of a 3-year gestation for the flagship War Artist painting of The Land Girl and the Bail Bull. Evelyn's colour sense was as sharp as at the first sighting. (p.6)²

October, 2007: Not significant in itself, this journey was noteworthy as the inception to a three-year period during which Evelyn worked, at intervals, on her concept of The Land Girl and the Bail Bull, now her best-known work. From the drawings and notes she made at the time she was able to convey the atmosphere of the occasion in the finished product. (p.4)²

Evelyn gave a short account of the inception of A Land Girl and the Bail Bull in a September, 1945 letter to the Secretary of the War Artists Advisory Committee:


[...] All the observation had to be done before 5am and once we did an all night journey of about 100 miles to the farm where the idea came into being, arriving at 4 o'clock in the morning and came back the next day!¹

No date is given for this overnight drive from Rochester to Sparsholt Farm Institute, near Winchester in Hampshire, where A Land Girl and the Bail Bull is set. Taking into account both an open-top car and pre-5am dawn, cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) in flower and teazels (Dipsacus fullonum) past their spring flowering, it's fairly safe to conclude that this happened in midsummer 1942, in the rich and heady - to use a frequent expression of Evelyn's - days of Roger's leaves shortly before their marriage.

Why they needed to go all the way to Sparsholt, with wartime driving restrictions, blackout and severe petrol rationing, when there were dairy farms much closer to Rochester is easily explained. They were both welcome there: before the war Roger had worked at Sparsholt, indeed he and Evelyn had met there. As Costings Officer, with a brief to train agriculture students and established farmers in the keeping of their accounts, he was familiar with the farms in that upland area of Hampshire. Evelyn was well known and popular at Sparsholt, from her frequent visits in 1940 and 1941.

Sparsholt Farm Institute may have been responsible for introducing to local farmers the use of bails. 'Bail' in this sense was originally an Australian term meaning a fixed wooden halter in which the cow's head was secured during milking. It took on the meaning of a mobile shed fitted with milking stalls, capable of being towed by tractor from field to field. Roger himself described them thus:


...bails were a wartime alternative to new farm buildings [...] They were four or five stalls under a roof with suction and vacuum hoses and a vacuum pump at one end and the theory was that you kept them in the field and didn't bring the cows in and the cows were attended and then walked out at the back and then you got the milk. They were also made mobile because of the treading effects after a day or two if there was wet weather they became bogged down. So they were moved on. They were particularly peculiar to Hampshire, because of the Hampshire Downs' very light soil [...] There were one or two [...] on the College farm.³

Ar first Evelyn found the bail and the activity round it uninspiring, too busy and not what she had originally envisaged. However she made a quantity of sketches (how many, and of what type, is not known: virtually all her sketches and drawings disappeared after her death in 1960), presumably in water colour in view of Roger's remark about the sharpness of her colour sense. They did indeed witness the extraordinary scene of a Land Girl capturing the bull, not an easy task and not without risk. Roger again:

She made careful drawings of [the bail] and set it in the landscape and made further sketches of the activity at milking time: there was too much of it for her liking, but after the cows in milk had passed through the bail there were a few dry cows lying and standing about and the more dramatic scene of the young bull, who ran with the cows but was fed separately, confronting the landgirl. Evelyn did not see the possibilities of a composition (as distinct from a pictorial record): in fact, the idea was slow to develop and caused much heart-searching. Negative thoughts prevailed at first.³

These impressions matured over the next three years. Much later, in 2003, Roger gave a detailed account of the composition or assemblage of A Land Girl and the Bail Bull to Gill Clarke, Evelyn's biographer:

[Evelyn defined] the precise colour and thickness of paint required on the canvas. In this modus Evelyn was infallible. To apply the rules of composition was not straight forward, there were only three elements to be combined, but they were disparate - one inanimate, one animal, one human - and would only make a whole under the unifying influence of the prevailing light. Of the elements, the landgirl had to show to advantage, the bull was amorphous and not a subject in its own right, and the bail a rectangular shape and potentially interesting to paint, was something of a foreign body. So the landgirl was positioned by Golden Section (and the extent of her dominance decided after experimentation), and the bull was placed centrally with lowered head making a diagonal line to the developing mackerel sky, and the bail was pushed into the background, away from the action.³


The model for the Land Girl was Evelyn's sister Jessie, a neat, tidy and cheerful person we last saw crossing the road in The Queue at the Fish Shop. Posing for the Land Girl, in the summer months of 1945, was the last modelling Jessie did. Jessie was usually conveniently available to model, without fee, for Evelyn at home at The Cedars when she wasn't occupied with running, together with her other sister Marjorie, their two Rochester High Street shops, The Children's Shop at No. 90 and The Fancy Shop at No. 168. Artists' models are all too often forgotten. Towards the end of 1945 Evelyn left Rochester and the family home to go and live with Roger in Warwickshire. This may have contributed to something of a breach with the remaining Dunbars, Ronald, Jessie and Marjorie, none of whom married, which was never entirely healed. The roles that both Jessie and Marjorie played as their very talented sister's models should not be underconsidered. They gave her a great deal of help.
 
Jessie as the Land Girl leads us, as ever when Evelyn has something important to say, into the painting from the left. We don't see her full face, not in this instance because Jessie had a wall eye, but because her gaze is focussed on the bull. With her right hand she's holding a chain with a snap link. It's hidden from the bull, but not from the viewer. In her left hand the Land Girl is holding by its rim a bucket, offering it to the bull, enticing him  to approach her, allowing her to move closer. We can't see what is in the bucket: Evelyn wrote 'fodder' in her short description at the head of this commentary, but we can guess cattle feed pellets laced with liquorice or molasses. The bull, casting a delectably painted wary eye on her, will lift his head from the grass he is eating, and, lured by the irresistible scent of the pellets, will put his snout into the bucket and at that moment the Land Girl will deftly attach the snap link to the ring in the bull's nose. The bull, throughout history a feared symbol of unprovoked aggression and ferocity, will have been captured, controlled and tethered. By a young woman. For those whose imaginations are nourished by such things, A Land Girl and the Bail Bull is a kind of reversal of the legend of Europa and the bull.

There are two other human figures in The Land Girl and the Bail Bull, a Land Girl working at the bail and the white-overalled dairyman, a curiously ghostly figure because the spars of the hurdle show through him. These two play no part in this drama, although various lines - the painting is rich in geometry - lead directly towards the dairyman. Like the people in The Queue at the Fish Shop disregarding the RAF officer cycling past (who we know is Roger), the bail staff are not even looking in the direction of the bull and the Land Girl.  No help is at hand for her should things go wrong, should the bull decide to revert to type. (The prickly nature of bulls is maybe reflected in a little visual pun: the scrubby tree to the right of the bull is a hawthorn, and we've already mentioned the needle-sharp teazels.) The viewer may detect certain echos from Pieter Brueghel the Elder, for instance in The Fall of Icarus (attrib.), where a momentous occurrence is taking place, but no one is actually taking any notice.

The Land Girl has earned the dairyman's complete faith in her courage and trust in her ability to get things right, even to take it for granted. She, representing the Women's Land Army in general, has come a long way since those first tentative volunteers ventured into agriculture, as shown in Milking Practice with Artificial Udders and Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook. The initial reluctance of farmers to take on Land Girls is clearly a thing of the past, too.

Pausing to admire the consummate draughtmanship of the foreground flora and of the cattle - the calf curled up in the centre would grace any Renaissance Nativity - the landscape beyond the bail and its associated sheds is pure Evelyn, the Evelyn of the Covenant: neat, organised, productive farmland as far as the eye can see, Hampshire stretching away eastwards into Berkshire and Surrey, to the horizon and beyond, a landscape worked and loved in equal measure.4

The extraordinary mackerel or peacock tail sky did not feature in Evelyn's original Sparsholt sketches. It was something Evelyn had observed, to her surprise and pleasure, at least ten years earlier, during her student days in the early 1930s: one summer morning she woke early, saw this dramatic dawn sky, hurried into some clothes, snatched up her water-colour equipment and rushed outside to capture it before it disappeared.

So the mackerel sky was pasted, so to speak, into The Land Girl and the Bail Bull. The sun will appear over the eastern horizon, in the centre of the picture, in a few minutes' time: the various cloud formations diffuse and soften its light, something like frosted glass does. The pre-dawn light that so captivated Evelyn is so convincingly rendered that, after the landscape, it becomes a strong unifying factor. The war has been won: is this the light of the new dawn?


¹ Quoted in Gill Clarke Evelyn Dunbar: War and Country (Sansom & Co., Bristol 2006) p131

² Roger Folley Evelyn Dunbar: The Husband's Narrative (unpublished) May 2007, revised October 2007

³ Letter from Roger Folley to Gill Clarke, op. cit. pp 130-131

4 'A landscape worked and loved in equal measure': I came across this amiable expression inscribed on a wall at the Teampull Café at Northton, on the Isle of Harris, Outer Hebrides. Despite the magnificent view over Scarista Bay with which it was associated being almost all seascape and untouched by human hand, I thought how well it crystallised the feeling behind Evelyn's agricultural landscapes. I've tried without success to discover who first wrote these words. Whoever it may have been, thank you, and I hope you have no objection to them being quoted here.

 

(Original text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2012. 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
 

Thursday 6 December 2012

Christmas 1944

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1944 Pre-publication presentation (?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection

Evelyn's husband Roger Folley, serving with 488 (N.Z.) Squadron based at Amiens-Glisy in northern France, is the subject of their Christmas card for 1944. Roger managed to obtain a few days' leave at Christmas time, which he spent with Evelyn at The Cedars, the Dunbar family home in Rochester.

Evelyn has drawn Roger in his flying kit, leather helmet with earphones, night-vision goggles, oxygen mask and very non-uniform cravat. She has signed her drawing E.F. on Roger's right shoulder, and beneath she has written 'From a drawing of Roger on leave from France'. (It should enlarge if you click on it.)

For the first time in their series of Christmas cards Roger has added his own poem:

Wrong was strong for Right to fight-
The struggle's on, it is not won.
Many are freed; they're still in need.
Our counterparts have thankful hearts.
We, their saviours, know what prayer does,
And intercede against self-heed.


During Roger's Christmas leave his pilot, Wing Commander Ron Watts, Commanding Officer of the squadron, had rostered himself for duty and had invited another navigator to take the seat beside him in his De Havilland Mosquito night-fighter. This team brought down a Luftwaffe Junkers 188 in the early hours of Christmas Eve, and I have sometimes wondered what Roger felt about having missed out on what his colleagues would have called a 'kill'.

Roger Folley would have been 100 on the day this was posted, 6th December 2012.

(Original text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2012. All rights reserved.)


 
Further reading...
EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING by Christopher Campbell-Howes
is available to order online from
http://www.casematepublishing.co.uk/index.php/evelyn-dunbar-10523.html
448 pages, 300 illustrations. £25

Monday 3 December 2012

A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling (1944)

  A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling 1944 (3' x 4': 91 x 121cm) Manchester City Art Gallery

A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling is almost the last of Evelyn's Women's Land Army paintings, and almost the last of her wartime canvases. The preliminary sketches were made at East Malling Research Station, not far from Maidstone, in December 1944. At the time her husband Roger Folley was serving with his RAF unit, 488 (N.Z.) Squadron based in Amiens, in northern France, supporting the Allies' advance towards Germany. Home leave was rare, dependent on spare seats on returning transport aircraft, but Roger managed to spend a short Christmas leave with Evelyn at the Dunbar family home in Rochester. Heartened and encouraged by Roger's presence, for this painting Evelyn returned, I suspect with great pleasure, to her beloved Kent landscape.

The East Malling Research Station of the Kent Incorporated Society for Promoting Experiments in Horticulture, to give it its full original title, was founded in the 1920s. Evelyn spent some time there in the winter of 1944/5, when one of the principal activities was pruning of fruit trees, particularly of apple trees. Until more disease-resistant rootstocks were introduced from the United States and latterly from Poland, the influence of East Malling Research Station on the British commercial apple industry was vast. Most commercial apple orchards used, and often still use, Malling series rootstocks, identifiable from the letter M in their reference numbers.


Evelyn's entrée to East Malling Research Station may have owed something to the horticultural economist Glynn Burton, a good friend of Roger since their student days at Leeds University. We may have met him before: he was one of the four 'mice' featured in An Episode in the History of the Lake District. Glynn Burton had strong associations with East Malling, where he later made his name as an authority on potato cultivation.

Evelyn was excited by this painting, and I think her excitement shows in the size of the canvas, the originality of the design, the care taken in its execution, the exceptionally sensitive colouring, in the inferences she draws and - I think - the little final joke she leaves the viewer with. It's a magnificent canvas that deserves close study.


Technically, we could consider it as an unusual historical document, because the thrust of some areas of research undertaken by East Malling was to develop cultivars for heavy-fruiting apple trees with limited upward growth, thus making them easier and cheaper to harvest. The trees in Evelyn's painting are much taller than commercial apple trees today. So these aren't any old apple trees, as one might say: they are some of the highest quality trees in contemporary Britain, the result of painstaking research, expertise and practical husbandry in selection, grafting and nurture.

Evelyn's squad of Land Girls, a mix of volunteers and conscripts possibly a dozen strong and maybe more disappearing into the far distance, are well wrapped against the cold of a Kentish December. A line of low hills - in fact the North Downs - defines the horizon. The sky is overcast and wintry. This may be Evelyn's only Women's Land Army painting in which gloves are being worn. Once again - disregarding the frame for the moment - we're led into the picture from the left, partly by the angle of the stepladder legs, and I wonder if Evelyn is deliberately drawing our attention to the extraordinary risks these young women are taking with such confidence.


The extreme right-hand figure, in apple-yellow coat, is standing very near the top of her step-ladder - you can see the white top platform to her lower left - and two others are pruning the upper branches of the nearest right-hand tree. Their acrobatics are nothing compared to another figure, to which - surely deliberately- various geometrical lines lead our eyes, in the third or fourth tree on the right: she's teetering precariously on the stepladder platform, at full stretch to reach the topmost branches. I can feel a slight vertigo just looking at her.

Maybe the Land Girl on the extreme left has no head for heights and has been excused climbing the stepladders, even though the rungs are covered with a non-slip material, or possibly wound round with rope. As evidence of the cold, she has her left hand in her coat pocket. The two aproned Land Girls beyond her, collecting pruned branches and twigs in a tarpaulin, may be looking forward to some extra warmth before so very long, maybe after nightfall, because the short midwinter hours of daylight must be put to good purpose: you can't prune in the dark, but you can make a bonfire of your prunings. In due course the wood ash, rich in potassium and trace elements, will be mixed with other nutrients and dug as required into the 360 acres of the East Malling Research Station. All very good husbandry. Waste not, want not, especially in wartime.


The avenue of apple trees stretches away to a vanishing point. Again, as in Singling Turnips and Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook, there are no limits to this plantation, and by extension no limits to the earth's abundance, if properly looked after. We return yet again to Evelyn's firm belief in the Covenant, the contract between the Creator and mankind: in return for love and care of his creation, the Creator promises it eternally and abundantly. It's unlikely that Evelyn's Land Girls had this thesis very much in mind at the time.

It's possible to think of A 1944 Pastoral as an allegory not just of Evelyn's Covenant but of the progress of World War 2 in the winter of 1944/5. The downfall of Hitler and the defeat of Germany seems assured, but maybe some distance away yet. Clearly it's not hard to attribute this or that allusion or reference after the event, but it does seem to me that there are similar prognostications in A 1944 Pastoral as in Sprout Picking, Monmouthshire from almost exactly a year earlier. Green, the colour of growth, and - if you take the idea a bit further - belief and trust in that growth, features strongly in both. As gardeners know, and as the old saying has it, growth follows the knife. The people involved in ensuring that growth are devoting themselves to it with determination and energy. I don't expect Evelyn intended deliberately to balance the calculated risk taken by the acrobatic Land Girl high in the apple tree with the risks taken by men on active service, but I don't think she would have dismissed the idea out of hand.

And then there's the border. The central picture is arresting enough in itself, the addition of the complementary border, at one or two points actually obtruding into the main scene, is a stroke of genius. We see the two types of saw, used for pruning the stouter branches, bright, clean and well maintained. Seven leather gloves with rolled cuffs (why?) hold seven secateurs, exquisitely drawn, none of them scissored but all, curiously, of the anvil type, in every conceivable pose, almost a kind of ballet.

Then there are the apples. We can admire Evelyn's subtlety in matching, on the white backgound of her plates and bowl, the colours of her apples with the colours in the pruning scene: the green Bramley, the red-patched Cox's Orange Pippin, the yellowish James Grieve or St Edmund's Pippin. These apples, of course, are the previous year's, so they're hardly yet the fruits of the victory that would be declared the following May 2nd, the first VE Day, but in Evelyn's mind they do represent the guarantee that the Covenant promise will be kept, and with hindsight we can applaud the confidence and optimism this painting expresses.

One apple is missing, from the lower right hand corner of the border. Why is it missing? Where has it gone? Has somebody anticipated the fruits of victory? I'm not certain, but in pondering this little conundrum, one of Evelyn's favourite quotes - in this case from Mark Twain - comes back to me, remembered from childhood: 'There ain't-a-going to be no core'. It was something she used occasionally as an all-purpose expression of finality, of closure, of the end of something, even a war:
There's plenty of boys that will come hankering and gruvvelling around when you've got an apple, and beg the core off you; but when they've got one, and you beg for the core and remind them how you give them a core one time, they make a mouth at you and say thank you 'most to death, but there ain't-a-going to be no core. (Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad)


(Original text © Christopher Campbell-Howes. 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 28 November 2012

Section Officer Austen, Women's Auxiliary Air Force Meteorologist (1944)


Evelyn Dunbar Section Officer Austen, Women's Auxiliary Air Force Meteorologist 1944 (1' 8" x 2' 6": 50.2 x 76.2cm) RAF Museum, Hendon

There's such a palpable change evident in this quite haunting and beautifully light and balanced painting, compared with Evelyn's two previous Women's Auxiliary Air Force studies (Women's Auxiliary Air Force Store and Portrait of an Air Woman), that I think it's legitimate to suggest that something positive happened in Evelyn's private life to account for it. At the time, the second half of 1944, she was also working on two major canvases, both with Women's Land Army subjects: A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling and A Land Girl and the Bail Bull, two of her most finished wartime canvases.

While Evelyn was working on the WAAF commission from her employers, the War Artists Advisory Committee, her husband Roger Folley was serving with 488 (N.Z.) Squadron. This squadron flew De Havilland Mosquito night-fighters. Roger's year-long training was not only in navigation but in in-flight radar operation as well. Mosquitoes had 2-man crews, pilot and navigator. Roger's pilot was Squadron Leader Ron Watts, a New Zealander who was eventually promoted to Wing Commander and took command of the squadron.

The Watts/Folley team flew 116 night-fighting sorties from various RAF stations, among them RAF Colerne in Wiltshire. It was at RAF South Cerney, conveniently near Colerne, that Evelyn completed her preliminary sketches for Women's Auxiliary Air Force Store and Portrait of an Air Woman.

In October 1944 Roger and his squadron were transferred to Amiens, in northern France, in the wake of the advancing Allies, and in the spring of 1945 to Gilze Rijen in Holland, where the squadron was disbanded a few days before the war ended. Roger had served continually since July, 1943. During these six months Evelyn and Roger saw very little of each other. Unable to follow him abroad, Evelyn lived at home at The Cedars in Rochester and looked for subjects nearby.

The preliminary sketches for Section Officer Austen, Women's Auxiliary Air Force Meteorologist were made at RAF Gravesend, almost within walking distance of Strood, the trans-Medway area of Rochester in which Evelyn lived. What was once RAF Gravesend is now a housing estate and leisure centre, so nothing remains of the wooden huts or brick offices, hastily built in the great UK airfield expansion of 1938-39, which once housed the meteorological department where Section Officer Austen worked.

Section Officer Austen, who looks about 25, is a study in concentration as she leans forward over a large map. We can't tell what the map is of, but it's likely to be of the Western Approaches, maybe stretching as far south as the Azores, so often the origin of the weather systems which would affect aircraft movement in support of advancing Allied troops in northern France and the Low Countries. The rolls of paper around her suggest tracings, maybe reports from weather patrols far out in the Atlantic, which Austen is adding to the overall weather map. At last Evelyn, or the censoring authorities through whom she worked, is allowing us to see a member of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force actually engaged on work of tactical importance. We know nothing about her other than her surname. If she is still alive she will be in her 90s.

A blonde colleague, equally concentrated, is sitting beyond Austen, within reach of a telephone typical of the 40s (then - and maybe still - popularly known as 'the blower'), and another, with a hairdo so splendid that it might be mistaken for a hat, is sitting in an office through the doorway.

Roger Folley, who died in 2008, was a quiet and unassuming man, not alone among ex-RAF aircrew in being almost pathologically reticent about his wartime experiences. However, in an uncharacteristic opening-up that was never repeated, he did once show me a home-made decoration his squadron colleagues had given him. I must have been about 13 at the time. I asked him, crudely, how many German planes he'd shot down. As so often in matters he  didn't want to talk about he ducked the question (in fact the answer was 1). It wasn't really for that, he said. The 'decoration', a plywood cross painted black and white like the wing markings of Luftwaffe aircraft, was attached to a large collar of crêpe paper and was inscribed 'Fritz Frier Folley', 'Fritz' being a generic term for Germans. His colleagues had presented it to him in recognition of the various tweakings and improvements he'd made to their in-flight radar sets, making identification of targets easier and more accurate.

Roger's contribution is recognised in a rather end-of-term-reportish understatement in Leslie Hunt's book Defence Until Dawn: The Story of 488 N.Z. Squadron, published privately in 1949: 'Roger had gone about his duties quietly but with a great sense of humour and as the Nav/Radio Leader had done some sterling work for the squadron.' In fact, as a result of his radar improvement work he was seconded to other RAF units, under a scheme called Navigator Lease, to train other navigators in its use.

It's no more than conjecture: something positive and reassuring had happened to Evelyn at the time Section Officer Austen was painted. I wonder if that something was her relief on hearing that Roger had been taken off flying duties?

Thanks to Graham Corner for help in the preparation of this commentary.

(Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2012. All rights reserved.)


 
Further reading...
EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING by Christopher Campbell-Howes
is available to order online from
http://www.casematepublishing.co.uk/index.php/evelyn-dunbar-10523.html
448 pages, 300 illustrations. £25

Thursday 22 November 2012

An Army Tailor and an ATS Tailoress (1943)

Evelyn Dunbar An Army Tailor and an ATS Tailoress 1943 (2' x 1'6": 60.9 x 45.7cm)
 Imperial War Museum, London

Maybe as a result of a continual flow of Women's Land Army paintings, and of pundits downward from Sir Kenneth Clark, Director of the National Gallery and Chairman of the War Artists Advisory Committee, remarking on their apparent lack of war content, it was suggested to Evelyn that she should record the activities of the various women's branches of the armed services.

This rather unusual painting has a question mark over it because I can't accurately assign a chronology to it. There appears to be no account of Evelyn visiting an army depot to record the scene above. I have a problem with the title, too: certainly there's an army tailor at the upper right of Evelyn's painting, but there are four ATS women in it, so maybe the title should be An Army Tailor and ATS Tailoresses, a title echoing in its categorisation of the sexes her earlier painting Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook. At any rate, that's how I should like to refer to it hereafter. With some reserve: there never was a designated army tailoring service. The manufacture and supply of uniforms was put out to civilian contract. The people in Evelyn's painting are doing individual alterations and sewing on badges.

ATS, for the record, stands for Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women's branch of the army. The ATS was founded a few days after the outbreak of war in September, 1939, and volunteers served as clerks, orderlies and telephonists among other fairly lowly occupations. In December 1941 unmarried women between 20 and 30 were conscripted into the various women's services, including the chief subject of Evelyn's brush, the Women's Land Army. For some reason the ATS was the least popular of the women's services, acceptance into the somewhat exclusive Women's Royal Naval Service being the most sought after, closely followed by the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. Despite expanding its scope to include more prestigious paramilitary activities like radar operation, decyphering and encrypting codes, gunlaying and ammunition inspection, the ATS remained the Cinderella of the women's services. However ATS members (known popularly as 'Ats', like 'Wrens' and 'Waafs') felt their image had received a welcome and necessary boost when in February 1945, and apparently of her own free will, the 18-year-old heir to the throne Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II) volunteered to serve in its ranks as a driver.

An Army Tailor and ATS Tailoresses shares with several other contemporary mid-wartime paintings, for example Land Army Girls going to Bed and Women's Auxiliary Air Force Store, a top-down viewpoint that makes me wonder if one of Evelyn's first requests on arriving at a venue was the loan of a stepladder.

The high viewpoint, while creating problems of foreshortening, does give us a panoramic view of what's going on, if panorama is the right word to describe five people variously arranged round a long table. It's clearly a warm room, probably in the depot stores: three of the women have taken off their tunics. We can't see exactly what the woman in the foreground is doing, but we can imagine that she's sewing on red arm strips. There's a box of such strips in the lower foreground. Beside the box are the tools of their trade: reels of white or khaki cotton, scissors, a steel sleeve slide, to prevent accidents like the inadvertent sewing of both sides of a sleeve together.

It's possible that the two women in the foreground are working on the same garment, a winter greatcoat. The left-hand woman appears to be sewing an embroidered crown on to one of the shoulders, indicating that the coat belongs to a major. It may be the major's cap that's seen upside-down in the right foreground, awaiting the addition of a corps or regimental cap badge. The addition of one or more red strips to his sleeve would show firstly that he belonged to an infantry regiment and secondly to which brigade his regiment had been assigned. Tentative and conjectural though this suggestion is, it would tally both with the organisational changes in the British army that followed the series of defeats in the earlier years of the war, and with preparations for the Normandy landings. Dating this painting to September or October, 1943, can't be far out.

The second woman on the left is sitting on the table in the traditional cross-legged pose of tailors, or as cross-legged as skirt-worn modesty allows. Unlike her colleagues, she has abandoned her services issue stickback chair. The underside of the seat would have a crown, or possibly the letters WD (War Department) branded into it: the rear edge of the seat would have had GVIR die-stamped on it, i.e. Georgius VI (6) Rex, to mark it as Ministry of Defence property. (Thousands of these chairs were issued. I owned four of them once, bought at an auction of ex-MOD furniture. They served as our family dining chairs for many years.)

At the far end of the table another ATS is operating a sewing machine. Completed battledress tunics, trousers and greatcoats cover the rest of the table, and the nearer floor spaces show that scissors have been well used.

On the right is the tailor of the title, a simple private, no Goliath, no warrior by all appearances. He's ironing something on a sleeve board, warming his flat-iron on a little trivet probably heated by short stubby candles like night-lights. When I contemplate this diminutive figure, I begin to wonder if Evelyn, maybe not entirely enamoured of this commission and wishing she was out of doors, isn't making an elaborate and sophisticated joke. She would be perfectly capable of it. So, how many people do you see in the picture?

While Evelyn was no feminist, as we understand the term today, she was proud of her sex and proud too of the very small, as she saw it, contribution she had made in the cause of the emancipation of women. She was too modest to give much value to her own personal contribution, but her wartime work in no way detracted from a general re-evaluation of the place of women in a largely male-dominated society. Exploring the social consequences of war, especially World War 2, was practically an academic cottage industry in the 1970s and 80s. One of the ideas suggested, one particularly associated with the now rather old-fashioned sociologist Stanislav Andreski and rather grandly entitled Military Participation Ratio, was that the more any section of society (e.g. women, blacks, scientists) contributes to a war, the greater the levelling of social inequality in that section's favour afterwards. I'd like to explore this idea further in the context of Evelyn's last, and greatest, Women's Land Army painting, A Land Girl and the Bail Bull, in due course.

It would be crass to suggest that the notion 2 women = 1 man ever fell from Evelyn's lips, but I wonder if in sketching An Army Tailor and ATS Tailoresses from the top of her stepladder the fleeting thought crossed her mind that if each woman represented two men, and if you added in the army tailor, you would endorse the old saying that 'nine tailors make a man'. She would certainly have enjoyed the story of Queen Elizabeth I welcoming a deputation of 18 tailors by saying 'Good morning, gentlemen both'.

There are two other features I'd like to single out. The first is the hairdressing, and the contrast between the elegantly-coiffed ATS and some of the nondescript hair-dos of Evelyn's Land Girls. Perfectly natural: the Women's Land Army worked long hours out of doors in all weathers, while these ATS are sedentary, their perms not subject to sudden downpours or sweat-soaked, chaff-ridden scalps. But then the WLA had no ranks, all were theoretically equal, while the ATS had its full hierarchy of officers. Hairdressing and military discipline have often marched together. 

The second is the floor, which - unexpectedly - is extraordinarily beautiful in its balance of abstract shapes and subtle colours, complementing but in no way drawing attention away from the activities round the table. I hope Evelyn enjoyed painting it.

(Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2012. 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





 

Sunday 18 November 2012

Christmas, 1943

Evelyn Dunbar Christmas Card 1943 Pre-publication presentation (?) 1955 © Estate of Evelyn Dunbar: private collection

The second of Evelyn's and Roger's Christmas cards shows two hands, one reaching down and the other reaching up, on a rock climb in Yorkshire. This is Almscliffe Crag, not far from Harrogate, and a pitch well-known to rock climbers called The Flake. Roger knew it well from his student days, 1932-36, at Leeds University, and had introduced Evelyn to it at some time during his RAF leaves. I can imagine that he found in rock climbing not only a freedom and release from the mortal pressure and claustrophobia of constant sorties as a navigator with 488 (N.Z.) Squadron, but also a deep delight in discovering that Evelyn could share his passion for rock climbing as well.

Roger chose the text, an extract from The Pilgim's Progress:

This Hill, though high, I covet to ascend;
The difficulty will not offend;
For I perceive the way to life lies here;
Come, pluck up, Heart; let's neither faint nor fear:
Better, tho' difficult; th' right way to go,
Than wrong, though easy, where the end is wo
.

(In this section of The Pilgrim's Progress, the hero Christian arrives at the foot of a hill called Difficulty. At the foot of the hill his two companions, Formalist and Hypocrisy, duck out of climbing the steep path up the hill and take the easy paths left and right round the foot, not knowing that one path leads to Danger and the other to Destruction. Christian is later described as changing 'from running to going [i.e. walking], and from going to clambering on his hands and knees, because of the steepness of the place'. So Roger's quotation and Evelyn's drawing are particularly apt.)

There are several paths to follow from all this, not necessarily leading to Danger and Destruction, but maybe not to anywhere else in particular either. Certainly, the two hands suggest mutual assistance, support and encouragement in difficult times between husband and wife, but I think Evelyn's later comment, in her own handwriting, 'The War continues: courage and patience are tried' reaches outwards to the wider world.

By Christmas 1943 the presence of American troops in Britain, in preparation for the Normandy landings the following year, was universally felt. 'Hands across the sea' wasn't only the name of an 1899 Sousa military march given radio airing occasionally alongside Bing Crosby's I'm dreaming of a white Christmas or Glenn Miller's Moonlight Serenade or the Mills Brothers' Paper Doll on the popular American Forces Network: it was a metaphor for the assistance, support and encouragement given by the USA to the British and other allied forces. (It was borrowed for the title of a 1980s TV series about the relations, not always trouble-free, between US troops stationed in England and the natives.)

So much for any allusions in Evelyn's drawing, historical now but very present then. And the sharp-eyed will notice - the drawing should enlarge if you click on it - that wittingly or unwittingly she has been unable to escape, in the lower right-hand side where far below a river flows, a suggestion of fields neatly enclosed by drystone walls. Agriculture is never far away.

(Original text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2012. All rights reserved.)


 
Further reading...
EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING by Christopher Campbell-Howes
is available to order online from
http://www.casematepublishing.co.uk/index.php/evelyn-dunbar-10523.html
448 pages, 300 illustrations. £25




Thursday 15 November 2012

The Queue at the Fish Shop (1942-45)

Evelyn Dunbar The Queue at the Fish Shop 1942-5 (2' x 6': 62 x 183cm) Imperial War Museum, London


(Evelyn took several years to finish The Queue at the Fish Shop, known affectionately in the family as The Fish Queue. She started it in the spring of 1942, and finally submitted it to the War Artists Advisory Committee in 1945. She 'borrowed' it back from the Imperial War Museum for her only solo exhibition in 1953. I wrote the essay below almost 10 years ago, as part of a joint biography I planned to write of Evelyn and her husband Roger Folley. The title, drawn from the implications of this painting, was to have been The Artist, the Airman and the Promise of Plenty. One day...)

There are 24 women and children, and there may well be more, extending out of the frame and further along the pavement. Apart from the RAF officer, there are only two men, both too old for military service. They're all very patient. Forming an orderly queue is something they're used to. It was the same yesterday and will probably be the same tomorrow. It hasn't needed anyone to organise them, to shout orders and shepherd them into line, to cordon off part of the pavement and make sure no one jumps the queue. These people can regulate themselves.

The youngest is an infant of about 18 months. The oldest is possibly the elderly woman at the head of the queue. There are a few children, a little blonde girl in a blue coat in the centre of the picture, one of the few characters showing any sign of boredom or fractiousness. There's a toddler in arms, a small child in a balaclava and reins, a girl of about 14 in a black beret talking down to her restless sister in bobble hat and raincoat. There are only two men in the queue, both of retirement age. There's a third just beyond the airman on his bicycle, but he's on his way elsewhere and in a moment he will have disappeared out of the frame like the woman on the extreme right. All the rest are women, mothers, grandmothers, housewives, landladies, providers. It's important to them to dress well, to keep up appearances. Some have dressed very carefully, all belong to a generation unused to going out without a hat. The mirrors inside countless front doors will have been well used. Some are aloof, some are chatting in a desultory, doctor's waiting-room way, others are deep in conversation.

All are well covered against the freshness of the morning. There's no evidence of poverty, ill-health, deprivation or fear. These people are comfortable in their resignation, determined, confident. The fish will arrive, the queue will shuffle forward, Mr Hill the fishmonger will greet his regulars by name. This is an image not just of hope and optimism but, more powerfully, of guarantee.

It doesn't take very much detective work to date the scene fairly exactly.  First of all, it's wartime, so it takes place sometime between 1939 and 1945. If we didn't know this already, the kerb-stones are painted white at intervals as an aid to driving at night in blackout conditions. There are clues to the season. It's probably term-time: there's only one child - the girl in the bobble hat - who is obviously of school age. If schools were on holiday there would be more children, although it's possible that they may have been evacuated to avoid the bombing. The people are wearing winter clothes. They have a settled look, as though they've been out of the winter clothes wardrobe for some time. Many are wearing scarves and gloves, although the airman's gloves are part of his uniform. Nobody is wearing boots, however, so the cold can't be extreme. Some have open necks and coats undone, and the airman isn't wearing his greatcoat.

An upstairs window is open, with a hyacinth in bloom. It's a fresh morning with a watery sun shining, casting pale shadows that are too short for midwinter. It's February or March. A viewer with an astrological bent would agree: everything suggests Pisces, the fish, and maybe there's a visual pun here. In any case the year has turned. Sunnier days lie ahead.

But which year? War wasn't declared until September 1939, and hostilities were fairly low-key until May 1940. On the civilian front, apart from a flurry of V1 self-propelled bombs which the people in the queue, like everyone else, referred to as 'doodlebugs', things had calmed considerably by 1944 and in the early months of 1945 the end was in sight. The strong probability is that the scene is set in 1941, '42 or '43.

It has to be a weekday: even in wartime fishmongers don't open on Sundays. It might be a Saturday: the comparative absence of children is ambivalent. No housewife ever bought fresh fish on a Monday, even if she could take time off from the weekly wash to go and queue. Then, as now, there was a lingering vestige of a tradition of eating fish on Fridays, which might weigh slightly against the other available weekdays. The time of day isn't hard to calculate from the shadows and the orientation of the scene: it's about 10 o'clock in the morning. Tentatively the scene can be set on a February or March weekday morning in the middle years of World War 2.

There are other figures besides the people in the queue. A man in a blue and white striped apron is washing down the slab on which the fish will eventually be displayed. His colleague is similarly occupied inside the shop. One of the two is likely to be the son of the H.Hill referred to on the upper wall of the shop: if the business was established over 50 years previously, H.Hill, the Victorian founder, will very probably have been dead for some years. Mr Hill junior or his colleague will serve each customer, will weigh the selected fish and take it to the back of the shop to be filleted, dressed and wrapped first in a thin greaseproof paper and finally in newspaper. The package will be returned to the customer, and the assistant will take the money. There won't be any ration books, with coupons to cut out, like there were at the grocer's and butcher's. Fish was never rationed during World War 2, hence the queue. The assistant will carry the payment to the cashier in a little office at the back of the shop, who will give change. A lot of to-ing and fro-ing, as evidenced by the wear on the shop threshold.

It's possible that the cashier is Mrs Hill, and that the family lives over the shop. Maybe the hyacinth in the upstairs window has been grown by Mrs Hill, kept over the winter in a dark cupboard and taken out to flower as the days lengthen perceptibly. Perhaps it's her little black cat waiting at the side door with the same confident expectation as the people in the queue. This cat is not to be under-considered, because cats, although generally beloved of the British, are not common in national painting, even as details. A random backward glance only lights on two instances, both Williams: William Hogarth, master of Enlightenment irony, and William Holman Hunt, dull Pre-Raphaelite moralist. As it happens, both represent the traditions within which the artist is working.

Most of the people in the queue - none of them is recognisable, by the way - would remember the day, some twenty years after The Queue at the Fish Shop was painted, when Mr Hill's shop, Onslow's next door and several other neighbouring properties in Strood High Street, collectively known as Angel Corner, were demolished to widen the road. The artist could hardly have chosen a location more redolent of embattled England. This road is one of England's major arteries, at the time the principal link between London and Nazi-occupied France, a road of historical significance: it's Watling Street, the A2, linking London with Dover and passing through Canterbury. News of the destruction of the Spanish Armada by English fireships would have passed this way en route for London, as would despatches from Marlborough at Blenheim and Wellington at Waterloo.

Evacuated troops from Dunkirk reaching the safety of the Cinque Ports would have continued their onward journey along this route. A quarter of a mile or so out of the picture to the right Rochester bridge carries the road over the River Medway, almost in the shadow of the Norman keep of Rochester castle. Leftwards out of the picture the road continues through that part of trans-Medway Rochester called Strood, rises to Gad's Hill, where Charles Dickens lived for many years, where Shakespeare's Falstaff had certain adventures, and which leads in its direct Roman way to London Bridge via the Old Kent Road.

The postal address of the fish shop would have been H.Hill and Son, 89-91 High Street, Strood, Rochester, Kent. The shop, a property dating back at least to the time of Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada, was actually a minor local landmark. The artist has distorted the building slightly, squashing further down an already squat building for the purpose of including in the narrow frame the upper floor of Mr Hill's shop with its inscription and its open window. If you wanted to look out of this window you would have to go down on all fours. 

Evelyn Dunbar The Queue at the Fish Shop (detail)

A woman is crossing the road with a capacious basket on her arm, and indeed anyone interested in baskets will find a rich harvest in this painting. She's there to add balance to the composition, but, curiously, we will meet her again in quite another context.


Evelyn Dunbar The Queue at the Fish Shop (detail)

And so to the airman. Where he is, life burgeons, the future is assured. In his immediate ambit, indeed occupying the area of the canvas between him and the woman looking at us out of the painting, there are four children so spaced in age that they could, theoretically, be siblings. The rings on the airman's sleeve identify him as an officer and the half-winged badge on the left breast of his tunic indicates that he's a navigator. For the sharp-eyed, there's a tiny fleck of red below: it's the ribbon of a decoration. The bag slung over his shoulder contains his regulation gas-mask. We know exactly who he is. He's a man originating from Colne, in Lancashire, and his full name and style is Flying Officer Roger Roland Westwell Folley, BSc. (Hons.), B.Comm., RAF. It's unlikely that he ever cycled down Strood High Street in uniform.

We know the identity of the woman looking at us, indeed challenging us, so directly out of the picture too. She is the artist, Evelyn Mary Dunbar. Her signature appears in the bottom right hand corner. The airman is her husband. They were married in St Nicholas' Church, Strood in August, 1942, while preliminary sketches for The Queue at the Fish Shop were on the easel in her studio.

(This is where my earlier essay ended.)

Curiously, The Queue at the Fish Shop is as much about Roger as the people in the queue and their circumstances.

Evelyn sketched the background from the first floor of the premises opposite, the rather grandly-named Strood Hall, a shop selling bicycles and electrical goods run by Evelyn's older brother, Ronald. (Ronald Dunbar, incidentally, taught me to play chess.)

This isn't the only Dunbar family connection: the woman crossing the road is the elder of Evelyn's two sisters, Jessie. Jessie modelled frequently for Evelyn. A year or two later she modelled for the greatest of Evelyn's war paintings, A Land Girl and the Bail Bull. We never see Jessie, a busy, willing and cheerful person, in more than half- or quarter-profile, because she had a wall eye. (Evelyn's other sister, Marjorie, was reckoned to be the family beauty. In the 1930s she was happy to model for Evelyn: we see her in the Brockley murals, An English Calendar and often in Gardeners' Choice. Later she developed an unpleasant and unsightly condition called lupus, which disfigured her face with something like a pronounced and virulent eczema and which spread continually. She became more and more reclusive until she died in the 1970s. Maybe it should be remembered that the Dunbars, apart from Ronald and their father William, were Christian Scientists.)

There are some curious anomalies concerning Roger in The Queue at the Fish Shop. Evelyn has included him - they were engaged at about the time she started the preliminary sketches - as a symbol. I'll come to this in a moment, but at the time of painting Roger held a very junior commissioned rank, Flying Officer. By the time The Queue at the Fish Shop was submitted in 1945, Roger had been promoted to Flight Lieutenant. Nevertheless Evelyn left him with one ring on his sleeve, instead of the two his promoted rank would have required. Nor, at the time of painting, did Roger have his Navigator's half-wing. Evelyn has added it later. None of this matters: it was what he stood for that interested Evelyn, not his badges of rank.

However, there is a tiny fleck of red just below and to the left of his Navigator's half-wing. This is the ribbon of General Service Star, dismissively referred to in the services at the time as the Naafi Gong, because it was distributed so universally that it lost its value and could thus in theory be earned by merely leaning against the Naafi counter. The Queue at the Fish Shop was submitted before Roger was awarded it. Did Evelyn include it in anticipation?

This seems unlikely. But there's another explanation: in 1953 Evelyn mounted the only solo exhibition of her career, at Wye College in Kent, an outpost of Imperial College, London, where Roger was working as a lecturer in the School of Rural Economics and Related Studies. Evelyn asked the various galleries then displaying her paintings if she could borrow a total of six of them for this exhibition. The Imperial War Museum had no objection, and The Queue at the Fish Shop was loaned back to its creator for several weeks. On this occasion that Evelyn added the red fleck of the General Service Star. This is probably of no interest whatever, except to raise the much more engaging question of what right an artist has to modify his or her work after its supposed completion.

As usual when Evelyn has something significant to say, we're led into The Queue at the Fish Shop from the left. Roger is cycling in from what is actually the west, from the direction of London and the great fish market and distribution centre of Billingsgate. (Or possibly Deptford, the Kentish Thames-side town that replaced Billingsgate for a time while bomb damage was repaired.)

No one in the queue is looking at him. It's as though he was being taken for granted. Not individually, as Roger Folley, of course, but as a representative of the armed services that protect and guarantee the nation's food supplies, in this instance allowing fishermen to fish and the fish wholesaler's van to draw up presently outside Mr Hill's shop.

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. Let's explore this in a little detail.

There are certain lines, actual or implied, in The Queue at the Fish Shop. 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. It must have been very exciting for Evelyn to cast this mantle, in some ways similar to that of Joseph in Joseph's Dream, on the shoulders of her fiancé/husband.

And 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.

(Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2012. All rights reserved.)


 
Further reading...
EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING by Christopher Campbell-Howes
is available to order online from
http://www.casematepublishing.co.uk/index.php/evelyn-dunbar-10523.html
448 pages, 302 illustrations. £30