Evelyn Dunbar - The Post-war Period

The Post-war Period

Dunbar's WAAC salaries and allowances terminated at the end of the war. Folley was demobilised in December 1945. Hitherto he had spent his service leaves at the Dunbar family home in Rochester. On demobilisation he and Dunbar moved for some 15 months into a cottage in Long Compton, Warwickshire, for no more compelling reasons than that they wished to make a married home together and that there was a vacant cottage next door to Folley's sister, Joan Duckworth. Despite makeshift studio facilities Dunbar completed her first portrait of her husband, Roger Folley (c. 1' 3" x 1' 8": 38 x 51 cm: private collection) in time for the winter exhibition at the Royal Academy Galleries. The first of two similar paintings entitled Dorset dates from this period. An allegorical painting featuring a recumbent woman looking out to sea, it was possibly inspired by a passage from Thomas Hardy's The Trumpet-Major. It is privately owned.

In 1946 Dunbar was appointed to a part-time teaching post at the Oxford School of Art, as well as becoming a visiting teacher at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. To be nearer Oxford, where Folley had also obtained a post in the University Agricultural Economics Research Institute, they moved from Long Compton to Enstone, Oxfordshire, in the spring of 1947. The Manor House at Enstone was their home for next three years, and this period marks the start of the most shadowy part of Dunbar's career, about which little is known and less is documented.

At her untimely death in 1960 at the age of 53, the storage shelves in a room adjoining the studio in Staple Farm, the Kentish farmhouse in which she and Folley were then living, were stacked with some 30-40 canvases, some complete and signed, some unfinished, some mere sketches. There were also numerous folios of drawings. Folley remarried in 1961, and in the interim Dunbar's remaining work was distributed among family and her many friends. Some was sold. Very little was, or has been, accounted for. For this reason it is sometimes supposed that Dunbar's post-war output was limited, and that her best work came from the pre-war and wartime periods. What evidence there is suggests that although her post-war work is unquantifiable, the quality of her work reached its maturity and peak.

At Enstone Dunbar completed her second portrait of her husband, which Folley renamed The Cerebrant (2' x 1'8": 61 x 51 cm) when he presented it to Manchester Art Gallery in 2005. Dunbar's post at the Ruskin School led to a commission by Worcester College, Oxford, of The River in Eights Week, 1922 (sometimes known as Summer Eights), an unusual painting outside her regular canon, of which no other details survive as the painting was stolen in 1994. Other paintings from the period 1946-1950 are only known about through references in sale and exhibition catalogues, personal reminiscences and passing mention in the only full-length biography of Dunbar, Dr Gill Clarke's Evelyn Dunbar: War and Country (Sampson & Co, Bristol, 2006). They include Oxford, an allegorical painting featuring a woman seated, with knees drawn up, lifting a dark blue canopy over the dreaming spires of the university cradled in her lap, and Mercatora, another allegorical study, of which Folley said '...was really navigation...air navigation which she might have learned from me. So that's probably what the spark, the germ might have been. Navigation...travel'. Joseph in the Pit (continuing her fascination with the Genesis saga), Flying Applepickers, Cottages at Long Compton, Woman with a Dog, Violas and Pansies, this last maybe an appreciative nod to Dunbar's mother Florence and her love of floral still lifes, exist as nothing more concrete than mere mentions, until further research reveals their whereabouts and appearance.

In 1950 Folley was appointed to the Department of Economics at Wye College, Kent, then the agricultural economics campus of the University of London. He and Dunbar left Enstone and took the lease of an isolated house some four miles from Wye. Here Dunbar held informal classes, maintaining her Oxford connections with an annual lecture at the Ruskin School. She concentrated on portraiture to an extent unknown before. Returning to illustration, she contributed almost 100 pen and ink diagrams and illustrations to A Farm Dictionary (Evans Bros., London, 1953), written by another Wye College lecturer, Derek Chapman. A third, unidentified Joseph painting may come from this period, completing a trilogy. Dunbar now had the time to devote herself also to landscapes of her beloved Wealden countryside. Modest, unsentimental and unshowy Kent and Sussex landscapes, always implying the reciprocal interaction between Man and Nature, abound from this period. The major canvas of her later years, Autumn and the Poet (3' x 5': 90 x 150 cm: private collection), developed slowly, incorporating its earliest origins in the countryside around Enstone.

By 1953 Dunbar was well enough established locally to mount her only solo exhibition, 'Evelyn Dunbar - Paintings and Drawings 1938-1953', at Withersdane, the administrative centre of the Wye campus. Of the 26 paintings exhibited, 6 were Dunbar's WAAC paintings loaned by the Imperial War Museum. Other paintings included Summer Eights, the elusive Joseph trilogy, Dorset and the lush and opulent Wye from Olantigh (1' 2" x 1' 6": 36 x 46 cm: private collection).