Evelyn Dunbar - War Artist

War Artist

In April 1940 Dunbar was appointed by the War Artists' Advisory Committee (WAAC), a department of the Ministry of Information, as an official war artist. The WAAC was chaired by Sir Kenneth Clark, later Lord Clark, then director of the National Gallery, London. Of some 30 artists appointed during the lifetime of the WAAC, only five were women. One of the first to be appointed, Dunbar eventually became the only woman artist to receive successive and continuous commissions. Her initial brief was to record in paint the main thrusts of non-military contribution to the war effort on the home front, excepting the industries associated with armaments. Among the terms of her contract were the requirement to submit all her work to the board of censors before display, and to cede ownership and all rights pertaining to her work to the Crown. She was allowed to keep any paintings not retained by the WAAC.

In consultation with Lady Stella Reading, founder in 1938 of the Women's Voluntary Service (WVS, now Women's Royal Voluntary Service), Dunbar was first directed to the voluntary services and the parts they were preparing to play in the expected air raids, evacuation of urban civilians, first aid, nursing and general deployment of housewifely expertise in an extended conflict involving the entire populace, aptly designated 'The People's War' by the historian Angus Calder. Her earlier war paintings, which are generously represented in the collection of Dunbar's work at the Imperial War Museum, London (IWM), feature hospital trains, nurses in training, methods of putting on protective clothing, making of camouflage netting, knitting circles, canning demonstrations and the like. These are mainly interiors, and focus less on the activities of the Women's Land Army than in the later paintings.

In July 1940 the Tate Gallery included Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing (approx. 2' x 3': 61 x 76 cm: IWM), the subject a challenge for any artist, in an exhibition of wartime art. This 6-box or compartment painting, each box depicting a stage in putting the protective clothing on, was included in an exhibition entitled Britain at War at the Museum of Modern Art in New York the following year. In September 1940 Dunbar submitted to the WAAC Milking Practice with Artificial Udders, (approx. 2' x 3': 61 x 76 cm: IWM), and it is inconceivable that Dunbar, a woman of charismatic cheerfulness and a strongly developed awareness of fun, did not find this amusing. Her visits to Sparsholt Farm Institute resulted in Women's Land Army Dairy Training (1' 8" x 2' 6": 51 x 76 cm: IWM), a 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 a good harvest, the first which the Women's Land Army was largely responsible for bringing in, Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook (private collection) had appeared, and WVS exploitation of that summer's excellent fruit crop was recognised in A Canning Demonstration (approx. 1'8" x 2': 51 x 61 cm: IWM). Among her November 1940 submissions to the WAAC was A Knitting Party (approx. 1' 6" x 1' 8": 46 x 51 cm: IWM), painted in the drawing room of the Dunbar house in Rochester and featuring some fifteen women, including Dunbar's mother Florence (the only hatless woman, surreptitiously looking at her watch), knitting blankets or comforters in service colours, navy blue, army khaki and sky blue for the Royal Air Force.

In these paintings, and in the later, more agriculturally centred paintings, the activities are mostly carried out by women, while men feature only marginally. This has occasionally led some commentators to suggest that Dunbar was a feminist. Whatever truth there may be in this should be balanced against her WAAC contract to record what she actually saw happening. There is no particular evidence of any social or gender partisanship at any time in her career: her beliefs in the synergy between human beings and nature, in the affirmation taken from Genesis that 'the Lord will provide' and her continuing commitment to Christian Science still form the basis of her conception of the world and her place in it.

These beliefs, always cheerfully held, were fortified when she first met at Sparsholt Farm Institute and subsequently got to know Roger Folley (1912–2008) in the autumn of 1940. Folley was a Lancashire man, an agricultural economist who had worked and lived on site at Sparsholt as Costings Officer. A Royal Auxiliary Air Force volunteer in his spare time, he was called up to serve in the RAF in August 1939, receiving his commission as Flying Officer in 1941. Having no family or friends in the area, Folley's service leaves were often spent at Sparsholt. In April 1941 Dunbar and Folley, with two other friends, spent a week rock-climbing in the Lake District. Although Folley was a practised rock-climber, the experience was a new one for Dunbar, but one to which she took readily. They created a joint record of this expedition in An Episode in the History of the Lake District (unpublished, private collection), with text by Folley written in the style of William Cobbett, and with pen and ink illustrations by Dunbar featuring the protagonists as mice, possibly in the spirit of another Lakelander, Beatrix Potter.

With the advent of Folley, and their subsequent engagement and marriage in August 1942, the focus and rhythm of Dunbar's work changed. Sympathetic to the reduction of outdoor agricultural work in winter, she undertook the completion of her hospital and nursing paintings in the winter of 1940-41. Hospital Train (1' 10" x 2' 6": 56 x 76 cm: IWM) and Standing by on Train 21 (ditto) 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 (3' x 5': 91 x 152 cm: IWM), spending some weeks in Pyrford, Surrey, where the London hospital had been evacuated. Dunbar's observation of hospital nursing activities is contained in a rectilinear mosaic of some 11 detailed vignettes.

A WAAC maintenance allowance gave her some freedom to travel wherever she thought useful. She travelled more widely as her association with Folley ripened, often following his various RAF postings. Sparsholt Farm Institute appeared only once more, as the Hampshire downland setting for her greatest war painting, A Land Girl and the Bail Bull (3' x 6': 91 x 183 cm: Tate Britain), which will be examined below. 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 (c.9" x 9": 22.8 x 23 cm: Manchester Art Gallery). 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 (9" x 2' 6": 30 x 75 cm: Manchester Art Gallery) and, across the Border in Northumberland, two studies of WLA off-duty life, Women's Land Army Hostel (9" x 9": 22.5 x 22.5 cm: Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth) and Land Army Girls going to Bed (1' 8" x 2' 6": 51 x 76 cm: IWM). It is possible that the uniquely titled Singling Turnips (c.1' 6" x 2' 6": 46 x 76 cm: private collection) originated in Wiltshire while Folley's RAF unit, 488 N.Z. Squadron, was training at Colerne, near Bath.

Folley's subsequent postings, to Bradwell Bay in Essex, France, Holland and finally to a non-flying post in West Malling, Kent, meant that for the later years of the war Dunbar worked mainly from her studio in Rochester. As the quantity of her output diminished, the quality of her canvases improved. Access to an unidentified RAF station enabled the completion of Dunbar's only formal portrait in her WAAC work: Portrait of an Airwoman (1' 6" x 1' 2": 44.4 x 34.3: 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 (1' 8" x 2' 6": 50.2 x 76.2 cm). Both these paintings date from 1944. By December of that year work was well advanced on A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling (3' x 4': 91 x 121 cm: Manchester Art Gallery), an imaginatively composed study of apple tree pruning and pruning equipment at the East Malling Research Station, conveniently close to Rochester.

Rochester itself, or that trans-Medway part of it called Strood, was the setting for The Queue at the Fish-Shop (2' x 6': 62 x 183 cm: IWM). Dunbar herself looks out of the painting, which was started in the spring of 1942 but not completed until 1945. The RAF officer cycling into the painting from the left is her husband Roger Folley, wearing the insignia of a Flight Lieutenant and the half-wing of a Navigator. A tiny fleck of red on Folley's right breast is the ribbon of a General Service decoration, which Folley would not have received until after the end of the war in July, 1945. 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.

Dunbar's final, and most finished, WAAC painting, A Land Girl and the Bail Bull, was also completed, with much difficulty, in September 1945. The model for the Land Girl was her sister Jessie, who, although she modelled several times for Dunbar, is never seen full-face because of an eye disfigurement. Dunbar had sketched the dawn mackerel sky, for eventual inclusion in a painting, many years before in Kent. The 'bail' is a mobile milking shed, seen in the middle distance against the background of the Hampshire Downs.

During the war Dunbar continued painting and exhibiting privately. In the summer of 1942 she exhibited Kentish Landscape and Mrs Dunbar and the Snog at the Suffolk Street Galleries in London. The whereabouts of these paintings is currently unknown. 'Snog' was an affectionate Dunbar family corruption of 'dog', so this painting may be the same as Mrs Dunbar and Paul or Woman with a Dog (whereabouts unknown); Paul was the dog's name. More significantly, in 1943 she exhibited Joseph's Dreams (1' 6" x 2' 6": 46 x 76 cm: Cambridgeshire County Council), a imaginative diptych illustrating the Genesis story of Joseph dreaming that eleven stooks of corn and eleven stars, representing his eleven brothers, paid homage to him. The corn stooks are strongly reminiscent of the stooks in Dunbar's earlier WAAC painting, mentioned above, Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook. In both scenes Joseph is wearing his coat of many colours, and the dream-background is of fertile fields and well-cared-for plantations: Dunbar's convictions of the synergy between man and Nature are expressed once again.