The Brockley Murals
The Brockley School commission 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 smaller areas beneath the gallery. Two of the five major panels, those on the south side of the hall, were each painted by Violet Martin and Mildred Eldridge, contemporary fourth-year RCA students. Mahoney himself painted two panels and the gallery ceiling, while Dunbar undertook the remaining north side panel, the frieze and 26 of the 28 lunettes and spandrels. The rich variety of subjects of these smaller areas, for example Minerva and the Olive Tree or The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, could be said to form an index of Dunbar's later themes and motifs. The subject for her panel, The Country Girl and the Pail of Milk, was taken from Aesop.
The principal figures in The Country Girl and the Pail of Milk were modelled by Ronald, the elder of Dunbar's two brothers, her sisters Jessie and Marjorie, and one of two gardeners employed at the family home in Rochester. It was Dunbar's habit to ask members of her household to model for her, partly out of economy and partly out of convenience: Brockley lies 20 miles by rail from Rochester, where Dunbar had her studio and where she completed her preliminary designs. At some stage during the painting of the Brockley murals Dunbar slipped on or fell from the scaffolding, resulting in an injury which left a permanent scar on her neck.
The subjects of Dunbar's murals, both the panel and the frieze, and their interpretation predict the chief preoccupations of her artistic career. The landscape, fertile and opulent, is Kentish, even down to the oast-house (used for drying hops for flavouring beer) on the skyline. The observer is looking at what is sometimes called The Garden of England. Dunbar's commitment is to Nature, and to man's place in it as its steward and guardian: the earth and all its bounty is there for man's taking, but the taking demands a commensurate giving through his husbandry. Dunbar found the clearest expression of this contract, or covenant, in the Bible, particularly in early chapters of Genesis. The Abraham-Isaac-Jacob-Joseph family saga (Genesis, Chs. 12 - 50 passim) provided Dunbar with occasional subject matter for paintings until the end of her life. This sense of love, synergy and partnership, and the power of its expression through allegory, informs almost all of Dunbar's work, sometimes through direct representation, sometimes (as in The Country Girl and the Pail of Milk) through allegory. In both cases Dunbar saw the botanically accurate representation of every animal, every plant, stem, leaf and flower, as the vehicle enabling her to fulfil her part of this supposed contract.
The frieze, a broad landscape of the area known as Hilly Fields, in which the school figures centrally, was observed from the life 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, at their allotments. In the foreground are boys in the uniform cap and blazer of the then Brockley School engaged in various activities, bird's nesting (more acceptable in the 1930s than now), flying kites, tracking each other.
Dunbar and Mahoney spent some three years, 1933–36, completing the Brockley murals. During this time they formed a close association, which developed into a romantic attachment. A further product of their association was a book called Gardeners' Choice.
Read more about this topic: Evelyn Dunbar