Evelyn Dunbar
[6] Evelyn Dunbar was educated at Rochester Grammar School for Girls, to which she had won a Kent County Council scholarship.
Encouraged by the Principal of the RCA, Sir William Rothenstein, Mahoney and a small group of fourth-year students including Dunbar were commissioned to decorate the assembly hall of Brockley County School for Boys, now Prendergast-Hilly Fields College, in south London with a series of murals illustrating Aesop's fables.
Framed by two allegorical figures, the landscape is animated in the middle distance by dogs, people walking, pushing prams and working at their allotments.
[citation needed] A collection of Dunbar's often lavishly illustrated letters to Mahoney covering their relationship between 1933 and 1937 are held in Tate Gallery archive.
In 1935 Dunbar was commissioned to provide the illustrations for The Scots Week-End and Caledonian Vade-Mecum for Host, Guest and Wayfarer (ed.
Its author, Michael Greenhill, was an instructor of recruits to the Women's Land Army at Sparsholt Farm Institute, near Winchester, Hampshire.
Many of Dunbar's illustrations, contrasting the right way of undertaking some agricultural tasks with the wrong way, were made at Sparsholt, using recruits as her models.
[7] In late 1938 Dunbar opened The Blue Gallery, a large first-floor room above the shop run by her sisters Marjorie and Jessie at 168 High Street, Rochester.
She invited Charles Mahoney (with whom she remained on friendly terms) and prominent contemporary artists Allan Gwynne-Jones, Barnett Freedman and Edward Bawden, to contribute their work to her first group exhibition, which opened in March 1939.
Folley, from Lancashire, was an agricultural economist who had worked and lived on site at Sparsholt Farm Institute as Costings Officer.
As a Royal Auxiliary Air Force volunteer, he was called up to serve in the RAF in August 1939, receiving his Flying Officer commission in 1941.
A WAAC maintenance allowance gave Dunbar some freedom to travel and as her relationship with Folley grew, she often followed his various RAF postings.
The RAF officer cycling into the painting from the left is her husband Roger Folley, while her sister Jessie is the figure crossing the road.
[15] 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.
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.
Despite makeshift studio facilities Dunbar completed her first portrait of her husband, Roger Folley in time for the winter exhibition at the Royal Academy Galleries.
To be nearer Oxford, where Folley had also obtained a post in the University Agricultural Economics Research Institute, the couple moved from Long Compton to Enstone, Oxfordshire, in the spring of 1947.
At Enstone Dunbar completed her second portrait of her husband, which Folley renamed The Cerebrant when he presented it to Manchester Art Gallery in 2005.
Other paintings from the period 1946–1950 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 '[The subject]...was really navigation...air navigation which she might have learned from me.
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.
Alpha and Omega were painted on wood panels with both 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.
Some are unfinished, like that of the elder of her two nephews by marriage, Christopher Campbell-Howes aged 12, 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, 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.
Autumn and the Poet was slightly smoke-damaged in a house fire in 2004, but was restored in time for the 2006 exhibition marking the centenary of Dunbar's birth.
[citation needed] At the time of her death, the storage shelves in a room adjoining the studio in Staple Farm, contained some 30–40 canvases.
Dunbar worked continually, and there is nothing to suggest that at any time in her career did her output slacken, except for brief holiday periods, and even then, it was impossible for her to leave her sketch-book behind.
Her oil paintings were her prime product, but she left behind many portfolios of water colours, drawings, pastels, sketches and other secondary work, most of which were not seen for many years after disappearing shortly after her death.
[20] In 1961 a memorial window in stained glass, designed by her friend and colleague John Ward, and now in the Old Hall, Wye College, was dedicated to Dunbar.
[21] The first biography of Dunbar, written by Gill Clarke, was published in 2006 and was accompanied by an exhibition of the artist's work at the St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery in Hampshire.
[13] In 2013 Autumn and the Poet was featured on the Antiques Roadshow television programme where it was highly praised by Rupert Maas, and estimated to be worth £40,000 to £60,000.
