Evelyn Dunbar - Books and Illustration

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, of which the terms are not known, led to a much 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, Mahoney contributing the full-page plant drawings and Dunbar some 45 vignettes, many evocative of the Dunbar family garden in Rochester.

The success of Gardeners' Choice led to Dunbar being commissioned by Country Life magazine to compose their Gardener's Diary 1938, a weekly journal and appointments book animated by literary texts chosen by Dunbar and illustrated with her pen and ink drawings.

By the time A Book of Farmcraft (Michael Greenhill and Evelyn Dunbar: Longmans, London, 1942) appeared, the relationship between Mahoney and Dunbar had ended, although the couple remained on good terms. Mahoney, an agnostic leaning towards atheism, had never come to terms with Dunbar's Christian Science. Nor had Florence Dunbar, Evelyn's mother, taken to him. Apart from the Brockley murals and Gardeners' Choice, the other tangible relic of their association is a collection, in private hands, of Dunbar's often lavishly illustrated letters to Mahoney covering the period of their close relationship, 1933-38. No letters from Mahoney to Dunbar survive.

A Book of Farmcraft was produced in response to the need for a basic primer of husbandry demanded by the wartime re-direction to the land of many people, particularly young women, who had little or no knowledge or experience of farming. Its author, Michael Greenhill, was an instructor of recruits to the Women's Land Army at Sparsholt Farm Institute, near Winchester in Hampshire. Many of Dunbar's illustrations, contrasting the right way of undertaking some agricultural task with the wrong way, were made at Sparsholt, using recruits as her models.