Signed and dated and inscribed with colour notes

Pencil and pen & ink on paper

14 3/4 x 22 in. (37.6 x 56 cm)

Exhibited: The Blue Gallery, Dunbar’s art gallery in Rochester in March 1939, Evelyn Dunbar - The Lost Works, Pallant House Gallery, October 2015 - February 2016, cat 30.

Dunbar returned to the Strood allotments as a war artist in 1940, hoping to undertake a more extensive version in oils of this pencil study for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. Having set up her easel, she was surprised and distressed at being chased away by allotment holders thinking she was a German spy: from the elevated position of the allotment.

Evelyn Dunbar clearly shared Dorothy Gurney’s vision and sentiments regarding

gardens. In one of Dunbar’s many letters to Mahoney she described how her ‘little patch

is beginning to form itself (with our help) into a lovely place, I think, and with all the

new things, will be a perfect heaven of varied greys and greens and aromatic odours.’

(September 1933). Painting and gardening were twin passions to her and in pursuit of

both she exercised a strong degree of control laying out her garden with the same care

and precision she exercised when laying out her palette.

Although born in Reading her formative years from the age of six, when the family

moved to Rochester, were spent in Kent, ‘the Garden of England’ as it is often described.

Gardens, hop-fields, orchards, the rich abundance of the Kentish landscape, is at the

core of her work. While others might be moved by the Highland landscape of Scotland

or the rugged beauty of the Alps, her heart remained firmly in ‘the Garden of England’.

Her identification with the homely man-made landscape of this corner of England was

as much spiritual as visual and needed to be assisted by the hard graft of hedging,

trenching, mulching, carting and pruning as well as celebrated in paint. One of her

earliest exhibited paintings was entitled Gardening, (present whereabouts unknown)

shown at the Goupil Gallery in 1931 and singled out by the critic of The Scotsman who

described it as ‘a most sensitive study of the Slade School type, of figures in a garden

delicately drawn and thoroughly “felt”.’ (The Scotsman, 11 June 1931) Such a description

could equally be applied to the study of The Dunbar Family in the Garden at the Cedars

(CAT 2 and 3), the Brockley sketch for The Woodcutter and the Bees (CAT 25) or even

the slightly later Land Workers at Strood (CAT 31) in the present exhibition. Her vision

was always that of a comfortable rural middle-class domesticity as far removed from

the peasant life that had inspired rural painters of the previous generation such as

George Clausen (1852-1944) and Edward Stott (1859-1918) as from the urban scenes

of Herkomer (1849-1914) or Mulready (1844-1904). Unlike her wartime paintings of the

Women’s Land Army the men and women – frequently members of her own family – who

inhabit these landscapes and work these gardens are at home and comfortable with

their surroundings.

Her acuity of observation is equally apparent in her landscape as in her figure subjects,

trees are individual not generic, their deformations lovingly recorded: the apple trees

growing in the orchard in the study of her mother gardening (CAT 27) are just as much

portraits as Sleeping Beauty (CAT 12) the ten minute sketch of her father. In contrast

to the immediacy of these oil sketches her large panoramic study of the landscape

at Hilly Fields (CAT 23) spread over three sheets of paper has the awesome grasp

of form that one associates more readily with eighteenth-century landscapists such

as Francis Towne (1739/40-1816) and the Italian Giovanni Battista Lusieri (1754-1821)

whose panoramas were so prized by the Grand Tourists. She had a countrywoman’s

eye for the nuances of landscape, of recession, cloud formations and weather which

informs her slightest studies and gives authority to her major works, most particularly

A Land Girl and the Bail Bull (FIG 19)."