Evelyn Mary Dunbar (18 December 1906 – 12 May 1960) was a British artist, illustrator and teacher. She is notable for recording women's contributions to World War II on the United Kingdom home front, particularly the work of the Women's Land Army. She was the only woman working for the War Artists' Advisory Committee on a full-time salaried basis. Dunbar had a deep devotion to nature and a particular affection for the landscape of Kent. Dunbar was modest regarding her achievements and outside of the post-war mainstream art world which has led to some neglect of her work until recent years. She painted murals at Brockley County Secondary School, and was a member of the Society of Mural Painters. After the war she painted portraits, allegorical pictures and especially landscapes. She attempted a return to mural painting in 1958 with a commission at Bletchley Park Teacher Training College (which was renamed Lady Spencer-Churchill College, and finally incorporated into Oxford Brookes University), but was unable to fulfil the original specification.
Early life Dunbar was born in Reading, Berkshire, the fifth and youngest child of William and Florence (née Murgatroyd) Dunbar. Her father was Scottish, originally from Cromdale, Morayshire. In 1913 the family moved to Rochester, Kent, where William Dunbar established himself as a draper and bespoke tailor. Florence Dunbar, a Yorkshirewoman, was a keen gardener and amateur still-life artist. She was also a Christian Scientist and Evelyn Dunbar was also to remain a Christian Scientist throughout her life.
Evelyn Dunbar was educated at Rochester Grammar School for Girls, to which she had won a Kent County Council scholarship. Dunbar studied at Rochester School of Art (now the University for the Creative Arts) from 1925 to 1927, at Chelsea School of Art from 1927 to 1929. In 1929 she won an Exhibition to study at the Royal College of Art. She graduated ARCA (Associate of the Royal College of Art) in 1933. In 1940 the Tate Gallery purchased one of her early student works, Study for Decoration: Flight 1930.
Among her Royal College of Art tutors was Charles Mahoney. Encouraged by the Principal of the RCA, Sir William Rothenstein, Mahoney and a small group of fourth-year students including Dunbar were commissioned to decorate the assembly hall of Brockley County School for Boys, now Prendergast-Hilly Fields College, in south London with a series of murals illustrating Aesop's fables. Of the group Mahoney and Dunbar contributed most to the series, which was formally unveiled in 1936.
The Brockley murals The commission for Brockley County Secondary School (now the upper site of Prendergast School, Brockley) consisted of five arched panels, each measuring 12' x 7' (3.66m x 2.12m), plus a pediment-height panoramic frieze (8' x 39': 2.44m x 11.89m) together with a number of lunettes, spandrels and the three ceiling areas beneath the gallery. The two panels on the south side of the hall were painted by the RCA students Violet Martin and Mildred Eldridge. Mahoney painted two panels and part of the gallery ceiling, while Dunbar undertook the remaining north side panel, the frieze, a lunette, 22 of the 24 spandrels and four roundels on the central ceiling. Subjects for these smaller areas included Minerva and the Olive Tree, The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, while the subject for Dunbar's panel was The Country Girl and the Pail of Milk. The source of most of the fables was Aesop.
The principal figure in The Country Girl and the Pail of Milk was modelled by the older of Dunbar's two sisters, Jessie. The subjects of Dunbar's murals and their interpretation predict the chief preoccupations of her artistic career. The frieze, a broad landscape of the area known as Hilly Fields was observed from the vantage point of a nearby water tower. Framed by two allegorical figures, the landscape is animated in the middle distance by dogs, people walking, pushing prams and working at their allotments. In the foreground are boys in the uniform cap and blazer of the then Brockley School engaged in various activities.
Dunbar and Mahoney spent some three years, from 1933 to 1936, completing the Brockley murals. During this time they formed a close relationship, which eventually ended in 1937. A collection of Dunbar's often lavishly illustrated letters to Mahoney covering their relationship between 1933 and 1937 are held in Tate Gallery archive. No letters from Mahoney to Dunbar remain.
Books and illustration In 1935 Dunbar was commissioned to provide the illustrations for The Scots Week-End and Caledonian Vade-Mecum for Host, Guest and Wayfarer (ed. Donald and Catherine Carswell, Routledge, London, 1936). The illustrations to this miscellany consist of pen and ink frontispiece, vignettes and tail pieces. This commission led to a more significant production, Gardeners' Choice (Routledge, London, 1937). This book, consisting of the history, characteristics and cultivation advice of 40 garden plants, illustrated in pen and ink, was jointly written and illustrated by Dunbar and Mahoney. Country Life magazine commissioned Dunbar to compose their Gardener's Diary 1938, a monthly journal and appointments book with literary texts chosen by Dunbar and illustrated with her pen and ink drawings.
In 1941 Dunbar provided the pen-and-ink illustrations for A Book of Farmcraft by Michael Greenhill (Longmans, London, 1942). This was a basic primer of husbandry for those who had little or no knowledge of farming. Its author, Michael Greenhill, was an instructor of recruits to the Women's Land Army at Sparsholt Farm Institute, near Winchester, Hampshire. Many of Dunbar's illustrations, contrasting the right way of undertaking some agricultural tasks with the wrong way, were made at Sparsholt, using recruits as her models.
Pre-war painting In the spring of 1938 Dunbar contributed four paintings to the Cross-section of English Painting exhibition at Wildenstein & Co., New Bond St, London. These included An English Calendar, a 6' (1.83m) square divided into 25 compartments, twelve of which feature gardening scenes reminiscent of her Gardener's Diary illustrations, and Winter Garden. Winter Garden, 1929, shows the Dunbar garden at Rochester, with the family house in the distance featuring a modest tower at the top of which Dunbar had her studio.
In late 1938 Dunbar opened The Blue Gallery, a large first-floor room above the shop run by her sisters Marjorie and Jessie at 168 High Street, Rochester. Here she displayed her own work and included some of her mother's floral still-life paintings. She invited Charles Mahoney (with whom she remained on friendly terms) and prominent contemporary artists Allan Gwynne-Jones, Barnett Freedman and Edward Bawden, to contribute their work to her first group exhibition, which opened in March 1939. The Blue Gallery did not prosper and it closed after a few months.
World War Two
In April 1940 Dunbar was appointed by the War Artists' Advisory Committee, WAAC, as an official war artist, eventually becoming the only woman artist to receive successive and continuous salaried commissions throughout the war. Her brief was to record civilian contributions to the war effort on the home front. Her initial subjects were the activities of the Women's Voluntary Service, WVS, and later in the war, the Women's Land Army. By the end of the war Dunbar had some forty paintings accepted by WAAC.
Dunbar's early war-time paintings included, Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing In July 1940 the Tate Gallery included this compartment painting in an exhibition of wartime art and it was also included in the Britain at War exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York the following year. Milking Practice with Artificial Udders, – submitted to WAAC in September 1940. Women's Land Army Dairy Training Dunbar's visits to Sparsholt Farm Institute resulted in this dairy scene in which a Land Army recruit, modelled by an actual recruit called José Loosemore, learns to roll a milk-churn on the rim of its base.
By November 1940, after the first harvest which the Women's Land Army was largely responsible for bringing in, Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook had been painted, and WVS exploitation of that summer's excellent fruit crop was recognised in A Canning Demonstration. Among her November 1940 submissions to the WAAC was A Knitting Party, painted in the drawing room of the Dunbar house in Rochester and featuring some fifteen women, including Dunbar's mother Florence (the hatless woman, surreptitiously looking at her watch), knitting blankets or comforters in service colours.
In autumn 1940 Dunbar met Roger Folley (1912–2008) whom she would marry in August 1942. Folley, from Lancashire, was an agricultural economist who had worked and lived on site at Sparsholt Farm Institute as Costings Officer. As a Royal Auxiliary Air Force volunteer, he was called up to serve in the RAF in August 1939, receiving his Flying Officer commission in 1941.
Dunbar completed her hospital and nursing paintings in the winter of 1940–41. Hospital Train and Standing by on Train 21 are accounts of the emergency measures taken to relieve victims of the Blitz. A year later she completed St Thomas's Hospital in Evacuation Quarters, spending some weeks in Pyrford, Surrey, where the London hospital had been evacuated to. Dunbar's observation of hospital nursing activities is contained in a rectilinear mosaic of some 11 detailed vignettes.
A WAAC maintenance allowance gave Dunbar some freedom to travel and as her relationship with Folley grew, she often followed his various RAF postings. Folley's posting to a RAF training centre near Bristol resulted in several paintings of WLA activities in Usk, in nearby Monmouthshire, among them Sprout Picking, Monmouthshire.
Further training for Folley at RAF Charter Hall, Berwickshire, led Dunbar to the Scottish Borders, where she made the initial sketches for Potato Sorting, Berwick and two studies of WLA off-duty life, Women's Land Army Hostel and Land Army Girls going to Bed. The uniquely titled Singling Turnips is the fourth of her Berwickshire quartet. An Army Tailor and an ATS Tailoress (1943) captures a collective mood of deep concentration among her subjects as they sew new uniforms.
For the later years of the war Dunbar worked mainly from her studio in Rochester. Ministry of Defence authorisation to enter RAF South Cerney enabled the completion of Dunbar's only formal portrait in her WAAC work: Portrait of an Airwoman,(1944), now in the RAF Museum, Hendon. The subject, in Women's Auxiliary Air Force uniform, with a Good Conduct chevron on her left cuff, is unknown. Also in the RAF Museum, Hendon, is Section Officer Austen, Women's Auxiliary Air Force Meteorologist (1944), portrayed working at RAF Gravesend. By December of that year work was well advanced on A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling, an imaginatively composed study of apple tree pruning and pruning equipment at the East Malling Research Station, near Maidstone.
Strood, the trans-Medway suburb of Rochester, was the setting for The Queue at the Fish-Shop. Dunbar herself looks out of the painting, which was started in the spring of 1942 but not completed until 1944. The RAF officer cycling into the painting from the left is her husband Roger Folley, while her sister Jessie is the figure crossing the road. The ancient building housing the fish shop existed until the 1960s, when it was demolished to make room for a road widening scheme at a point called Angel Corner.