One day, Ro Dunbar was watching Antiques Roadshow when she saw a painting by her aunt Evelyn being hailed as a masterpiece. A quick search revealed 500 more like it bundled up in her loft
One Sunday night two years ago, Ro Dunbar was watching Antiques Roadshow when she noticed something shocking. One of the people queuing in the rain to have their antiques valued had just produced a painting by her long-dead relative Evelyn Dunbar.
“This is a masterpiece,” said painting expert Rupert Maas. “It is such an extraordinary picture.” Maas was worried about how to value a work by “what is perhaps an unknown artist”. In the end, he estimated £40,000-£60,000.
Autumn and the Poet was one of the last works ever painted by Evelyn, before her death in 1960 at the age of 53. It was a gift to her husband, the second world war airman and leading horticultural economist Roger Folley, and its whereabouts had been unknown for half a century. Evelyn, however, was not quite unknown. She was celebrated as the only salaried woman war artist, commissioned to record the work of land girls on the home front. Her war paintings hang in Tate Britain and the Imperial War Museum.
But the painting’s appearance on TV got Ro (who was married to Evelyn’s nephew) thinking. She remembered that in the attic of her farmhouse, near Cranbrook in Kent, was a tightly bound collection of artworks Roger Folley had left after his wife’s death.
“I had no idea what was up there,” she says. “I thought it might all be paintings by Evelyn’s mother, Florence.” But when Ro went to look, she saw that, along with Florence’s still lives, there was a whole hoard of works by Evelyn – the woman described as having “real genius” by Sir William Rothenstein, principal of the Royal College of Art, where she had studied. “I haven’t got an artistic bone in my body,” says Ro, who felt ill-qualified to judge what she saw. She called on Christopher Campbell-Howes, another nephew, who has fond memories of discussing his aunt’s paintings with her as a boy.
“Christopher was compiling a record of her paintings, so when I told him I’d found some in my attic, he flew over from France where he lives. When he saw them, he fell through the floor.”
What had been languishing in Ro’s attic for the best part of 50 years was a stash of more than 500 paintings and drawings. Overnight, it doubled the number of Dunbar’s known works. For 20 years, Campbell-Howes had been tracking the contents of Evelyn’s “lost studio” – which was dismantled after her death in 1960, its contents sold on or given away to family and friends. And much of it had been collecting dust in Ro’s loft.
“We decided we needed to call in professional help because it was pretty grubby,” she says. “There’s a bit of a nibble here and there, but nothing was too damaged. It just needed cleaning.”
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Allow and continueNow, Pallant House Gallery in Chichester is staging a show called Evelyn Dunbar: The Lost Works, featuring much of Ro’s hoard. It is the first big retrospective of an artist who has certainly been neglected and perhaps not properly understood since her death.
Evelyn Dunbar was born in Reading, the daughter of William, a draper and bespoke tailor, and Florence a keen gardener and amateur still-life artist. She was the bigger influence, and inculcated her children (Evelyn was the fifth and youngest) in Christian Scientist beliefs. Evelyn would remain a Christian Scientist throughout her life, and the church’s influence suffuses all her work.
“She held her beliefs to be self-evident,” writes Campbell-Howes on his blog. “The only doubts she had concerned the readiness of humankind to play its part in the Covenant. The Covenant – my term, not Evelyn’s – as she conceived it, was the promise given by the creator to the human race of a fertile and eternally abundant land, in return for mankind’s promise to cherish it, to appreciate it and to care for it through intelligent and devoted husbandry.”
That explains, no doubt, why nature rarely appears untamed in her work. “She didn’t really do landscapes on a grand scale,” says Ro. “She was more interested in hen coops, worked fields, and the business of tending the land.”
Indeed, almost all the art at Pallant House shows her love for mankind’s nurturing of God’s creation. In 1938, she was commissioned by Country Life to produce pen-and-ink drawings for its Gardener’s Diary and made witty personifications of each month. September is a woman laden with watermelons; December is a woman in a blue scarf carrying a yule log laced with foliage. She later reworked these drawings in oils. Among the works Ro found in her attic is Evelyn’s scintillating personification of February – a woman sporting a yellow cape, with crocus flowers and daffodil shoots in her jaunty hat, who seems to be lifting a cold frame as if to indicate spring is around the corner.
The exhibition also includes the paintings for which she is best known: her second world war commissions of the Women’s Land Army at work, such as Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook and Milking Practice with Artificial Udders. “She was a war artist but she didn’t paint anything awful like the other war artists,” says Ro. That, Ro suggests, was because of her faith. “In fact, she never painted anything bad.” Other women war artists did: Doris Zinkeisen painted Human Laundry, an image of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp’s starving survivors; Mary Kessell made charcoal drawings of homeless women and children in Berlin, as well as the destruction of Hamburg.
Ro admires Evelyn’s final war painting, A Land Girl and the Bail Bull from 1945. (The bail is the movable shed where milking is done.) The model for the land girl was her sister Jessie, who posed for her several times, but is never seen full-face because of an eye disfigurement. “She would have been extremely sensitive to showing any problems like that,” says Ro. “But I really like how close Jessie is to the bull. She must have been very brave.”
After the war, Evelyn settled into rural life in Kent with Folley. She didn’t exhibit much. “The commissions didn’t come,” says Ro. “She did one or two – they were mostly portraits. A lot of her work stayed in the studio.”
But Evelyn painted a great deal until her death, often depicting visionary religious themes that featured people she knew as sitters. In this she was similar to her contemporary Stanley Spencer. For the last 12 years of her life, she worked sporadically on Autumn and the Poet. It was an allegorical work, reflecting her faith as usual. It shows the fecund figure of Autumn, a bare-breasted and maternal figure, releasing a harvest from complicated drapery in front of a reclining figure – the poet of the title. The sitter for the poet was her husband Roger. Autumn was modelled by Roger’s sister, though it’s hard to resist the thought that the apparition represents Evelyn.
The final version of the painting was on an easel in her Kent studio when she died. After its appearance on Antiques Roadshow, its owner donated the painting to Dunbar’s local gallery, Maidstone Museum, which in turn loaned the picture to Pallant House.
And there was one more visionary work in Evelyn’s studio when she died: her painting of Jacob’s Dream. Based on the biblical story, Jacob is lying in a field at night. Above him, in a bubble, floats his dream – a ladder extending to heaven. Christopher Campbell-Howes remembers visiting Evelyn in her studio and talking about the painting shortly before her death: “This extraordinary painting is Evelyn’s farewell.” She knew, he suspects, that she was going to die and had been saying goodbye to relatives for weeks.
In the bubble representing Jacob’s dream is a hill with hanging beech woods, typical in the North Downs where she lived. It was in just such woods that, early one evening in May 1960 while out gathering pea-sticks with Roger, Evelyn suddenly collapsed and died. Roger later sold Jacob’s Dream shortly after her death for 30 guineas (£31.50), which works out at a little under £500 in today’s prices.
Not all Evelyn Dunbar’s works have been rediscovered. The whereabouts of two wartime paintings (one with the tantalising title Mrs Dunbar and the Snog) remain unknown.
Still, there is enough newly rediscovered work to be going on with. What will happen to her work when the show finishes? Will Ro sell off her hoard and make a lot of money? “It’s all up for discussion. The thing I’m most interested in is having her in the picture. More than anything, I’m glad she is getting the recognition she deserves.”
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