Evelyn Dunbar - The Last Years

The Last Years

Dunbar complained of 'never feeling quite well' from 1955 onwards, without being more specific. Her Christian Science beliefs restrained her from seeking medical advice. There is an air of resignation, acceptance and finality about her last work. Anxiety about her health may have contributed to the execution, to some extent unexplained, of the commission she received from Bletchley Park Teacher Training College in 1957.

Bletchley Park Teacher Training College was opened in January 1948 in the premises which, during the war, had housed the very secret Government Code and Cipher School, in later years celebrated for the breaking and exploitation of the German 'Enigma' codes. In 1957 very few were aware of its wartime role. Dunbar was commissioned to paint murals, maybe reminiscent of the Brockley murals, to express the aims and ethos of the training college through its motto Alpha and Omega, the first and last. In August 1957, during the College's summer vacation, Dunbar was working with scaffolding and trestles in the refectory or assembly hall, preparing large wall areas with size before the large-scale realisation of the Alpha and Omega designs finally chosen from the selection Dunbar submitted to Dora Cohen, then Principal of the College. These designs are held by Oxford Brookes University, into which Bletchley Park Training College was eventually absorbed. If these murals were ever completed, they are no longer there. There is a strong likelihood, however, that before Dunbar had advanced very far into the work she realised she had undertaken more than she could deliver. It is possible that the accident she had while working on the Brockley murals also contributed to a request to revise the terms of the commission, replacing the proposed murals with two much smaller panels, and therefore hardly to be called murals. Alpha and Omega (oil on wood: both panels measuring 2' 7" x 4' 4": 81 x 132 cm, dimensions dictated by the space above the College Library doorways they were now destined to occupy) are now in the possession of Oxford Brookes University.

Alpha and Omega are heavy with allegory and allusion, in essence to Dunbar's credo, the process of transforming what Nature has provided into something which will in turn enable Nature to continue to provide, and more abundantly. While the letter Omega (the Greek capital Ω) is represented by a background yew arch trained and clipped into this shape, the letter Alpha (the Greek lower-case α) is symbolized as a rudimentary bugle held by a boy of about 10. The identity of the adult models is not known, but the model for the boy was a lad called Barry Patterson, who together with one or two other friends used to spend occasional days out and odd weekends with Dunbar and Folley at the request of Leila Rendel, the principal of the Caldecott Community, a nearby children's home.

If Alpha can be taken incidentally as Barry Patterson's portrait, Dunbar made something of a speciality of children's portraits in the years 1954-60. Such portraits were of the children of colleagues, friends and family. Dunbar engaged very well with children, possibly because the marriage was childless, a state to which an early miscarriage may have contributed. As far as is known her portraits were gifts to her subjects' families, and are thus held privately. Some are unfinished, like that of the elder of her two nephews by marriage, Christopher Campbell-Howes aged 12 (14" x 12": 35 x 30 cm: private collection), in which the head is highly finished but the upper body, arms and background are merely sketched. In the last few months of her life she also painted her younger nephew by marriage, Richard Campbell-Howes (c.2' 4" x 1' 8": 70 x 50 cm: private collection), in an unusual and striking full-length pose in which the subject is sitting on a Windsor chair reading a bound volume of the satirical magazine Punch.

The last two paintings on easels in her studio at her death were Autumn and the Poet (see above) and Jacob's Dream (c.2' 6" x 1' 8": 75 x 50 cm: private collection). Both are concerned with dreams, both are testaments to her beliefs. Autumn and the Poet had occupied Dunbar, on and off, over the previous ten years. Like other canvases which took her a long time to complete, e.g. Winter Garden and A Land Girl and the Bail Bull, Autumn and the Poet achieves a high level of finish. The figure of the poet, half-seated, half-lying on the bare ground, propped up on his left arm, with a sheet of paper in his right hand, was modelled by Folley, incidentally a spare-time poet. The viewer is admitted into the poet's dream: challenging him directly, as Dunbar herself did in meeting the eye of the viewer in The Queue at the Fish Shop, is the figure of Autumn. Bare-breasted, Autumn is otherwise dressed in what might be interpreted as a winding-sheet, implying death, or a cocoon, implying life yet to develop within. (The fall of her drapes was modelled by Folley's sister, with whom Dunbar enjoyed a close friendship.) Autumn is trailing before the poet a sheet, laden with fruits of the earth. The dream-meeting takes place at a point where two rutted farm-tracks part, separated by a bramble thicket. (There may be reference here to the Genesis story of Abraham, who, preparing the ritual sacrifice of his son Isaac in obedience to God's testing of his faith, finds at the last moment that God has made provision, in this case a ram caught by his horns in a thicket, which Abraham sacrifices instead. It is possible that this was a subject for Dunbar's brush in a painting now lost.) Both tracks lead to the background of the same neatly ploughed fields and carefully maintained landscape that is evident throughout Dunbar's work. The sky is lighter on the Poet's side, darker on Autumn's: the Poet's day is at its start, Autumn will presently vanish into the evening. Autumn and the Poet was slightly smoke-damaged in a house fire in 2004, but was restored in time for an exhibition to mark the centenary of Dunbar's birth, at the St Barbe Museum and Gallery, Lymington, Hampshire, in 2006. Entitled Evelyn Dunbar: War and Country, this exhibition was curated by her biographer Dr Gill Clarke, and was also timed to coincide with the publication of her book of the same title.

Jacob's Dream refers to a passage in Genesis, ch. 28, vv. 10-22. The story is that Jacob, son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham, father of Joseph, lays himself down on the bare earth to sleep, using a stone as a pillow. He dreams of a ladder reaching from the earth to heaven, with angels going up and down. In the dream God promises the land on which Jacob is lying to him and his descendants. On waking, Jacob promises to serve God in return. As in Autumn and the Poet, the viewer is admitted into Jacob's dream. It is not known who the model, if anyone, was, for Jacob, lying foreshortened with his head towards the foreground. The dream is enclosed in the indeterminate oval shape that is the human field of vision. The angels are abstracted into brilliant white shapes. The ladder is set in a Wealden landscape of trim orchards and tidy fields, enfolded by wooded downland. It was in those beechwoods around Staple Farm, while gathering pea-sticks with Folley in the evening of 12 May 1960, that Dunbar suddenly collapsed and died. A post-mortem showed coronary atheroma to have been the cause of death.