EVELYN DUNBAR AND THE WOMEN'S LAND ARMY
EVELYN DUNBAR AND THE WOMEN’S LAND ARMY
A LAND GIRL AND THE BAIL BULL 1945
This is a painting that always used to make me pause if I passed through the gallery in Tate Britain where it hangs – even though I knew nothing at all about its painter Evelyn Dunbar and didn’t understand its title A Land Girl and the Bail Bull. I knew what a Land Girl was – one who signed up to work on farms during World War Two for the Women’s Land Army replacing the men who’d left the fields for the forces. But what precisely is this "bail bull" that the land girl is approaching with distinct nervousness? The farmworkers in the middle ground are getting on with their own tasks – whatever they are – and paying her no heed. Beyond them lies a wide stretch of English down land and a few distant cultivated fields and over the whole scene the sky casts a spooky dawn light, with bizarre cirrocumulus clouds, so unusually patterned – a mackerel sky or a peacock sky? It really looks more like the hide of a giraffe.
Evelyn Dunbar was born in 1906 the daughter of a Kent master tailor. She adhered to her mother’s devout Christian Science all her life and – though she knew many of the leading artists of her generation – membership of this particular religious group rather tended to set her apart. Graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1932 her first professional job was as a mural painter at Brockley School in Kent, working with her old tutor, and new lover, Charles Mahoney in collaboration with two other young women artists Violet Martin and Mildred Eldridge.
DUNBAR WITH BROCKLEY MURAL
During this time she was friendly with Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious, members of a generation of British artists who also included Winifred Knights, Rex Whistler, Stanley Spencer and Mary Adshead. These artists had a good deal in common. They rejected the extreme distortions of modernism in favour of a kind of heightened naturalism, constrained by a meticulous attention to technique. Most of them worked for some of the time as mural painters – in other words as public artists and Dunbar was very familiar with the belief many shared that art should play a vital political, social or educational role in public life.
When war broke out in 1939 Dunbar was 33. The affair with Mahoney had ended and she was now wondering what war work to do. Women who wanted to serve had various options, and one of these was to join the Land Army.
It was founded and commanded by the formidable Lady Gertrude Denman who set up its headquarters at her home in West Sussex. The organisation gave volunteers a basic uniform, a small wage, a crash course at one of the country’s agricultural colleges and a posting to farms big and small all over the country. The posters shamelessly glamourised this work, but the advertising worked. From meagre beginnings – just over 4000 volunteers in the first year – it grew to a mass movement and by the end of the war more than 100,000 women had served in the Land Army, which continued on a diminishing scale until 1950. But it wasn’t as an actual “Land Girl” that Dunbar served the Land Army: she became instead its artist in residence. The Ministry of Information had established the War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC) in 1939, chaired by Kenneth Clark, then Director of the National Gallery. Its brief was 'to draw up a list of artists qualified to record the war at home and abroad'. Dunbar was one of the first women to be signed up, with the job of drawing and painting women’s war service and in particular the Land Army. She was a very shrewd choice. Not only was she an experienced public artist but she knew a lot about horticulture and had always preferred outdoor subjects involving gardening or land work. So when in June 1940 she was sent to Sparsholt Farm Institute near Winchester where Land Girls were in training she threw herself into the study of a wide variety of farm activities.
WLA ACTIVITIES
In this page of her notebook are several that would result in finished painting. They also fed into A Book of Farmcraft in which Dunbar collaborated (as illustrator) with one of the Sparsholt teachers Michael Greenhill. This was a primer for the Land Army trainees many –– if not most –– of whom were from towns or suburbs and knew nothing whatever about farm work. Note the didactic distinction between the right and the wrong way of doing things.
Between a quarter and a third of the Land Army worked with dairy herds. Here’s Greenhill’s description of the right way to hand-milk a cow. “Hold the bucket in front of you in the right hand and the stool in the left, standing close to the cow’s udder, bringing the stool under you and the bucket between your knees. Now sit down so your left knee is nearly touching the cow’s leg and grip the bucket with both knees. Sit upright. Don’t rest your head against the cow’s side as loose hair and dirt may be dislodged and fall in the milk. Now place each hand on a teat taking the front or back two, or two crosswise…” In fact the trainees at Sparsholt initially learned by milking water from bizarre artificial cows as in one of the first and most amusing of Dunbar’s Land Army paintings. Her picturing of the girls in a line seen by perspective as diminishing diagonally across the picture plane was one of Dunbar’s signature compositional characteristics.
WLA MILKING TRAINING 1940
When she came to do a painting of harvesting, the repetitiveness of farmwork and the patterns that result are powerfully evoked. The reaper-binder in use here would very shortly be replaced universally by the combine harvester.
WLA REAPER BINDER & STOOKING 1940
After spending her first year as a war artist at Sparsholt, Dunbar travelled around to observe the WLA at work through the seasons. Potatoes were particularly vital to the feeding of the nation and in this almost classical-frieze-like composition the volunteers are using a hand-cranked potato sorting machine near Berwick on Tweed. It is a freeze as well as a frieze – you can almost feel the icy winter wind blowing off the North Sea. This painting also shows Dunbar’s skill at producing a very precise documentary effect. Even the sack tying on the left is based on what she herself learned at Sparsholt.
WLA POTATO SORTING, BERWICK 1943
In the same year Dunbar painted sprout pickers in Monmouthshire. This was one of the most hated jobs on the farm. You are in the depth of winter and the sprout is best harvested after frost. An unpleasant long stooping task, which froze the picker’s fingers, exhausted her legs and ached her back. It is noticeable here that Dunbar’s painting is significantly more impressionistic in style in this small 9”x 9” painting. In spirit and technique her style is far from the Impressionists.
WLA LIFTING SPROUTS 1943
For me, her Land Girl paintings are more reminiscent of Millet. Both artists seek to uphold the dignity even the nobility of the land worker, in bleak arable field settings and an uncompromising statement of the hard work being done.
Millet GLEANERS
WLA BALING HAY 1943
There is certainly nothing in Dunbar’s work like the socialist realism seen in for example contemporary Soviet depictions of workers, full of bombast and chest-thumping. It is quiet documentary painting which, in the painting of hay baling from 1943, proudly shows the WLA as having now earned its stripes, able to function without back-up or assistance from male farm workers that is evident in many previous canvases.
WLA HOSTEL CANTEEN
At the end of a working day of up to ten hours, far more than girls from towns were used to, land girls came in desperately hungry, as we see them in this scene in a WLA hostel canteen. Many billeted on the farms had complained about being kept on mean and peculiar rations – beetroot sandwiches, rook pie, porridge with tomato ketchup, and a lot of unrationed marmite. Some farmers were accused of consuming the Land Girls’ rations themselves, or diverting them into the black market. In other cases the farmers were hostile, or conversely they were over-friendly. Sometimes girls were even expected to skivvy in the farmhouse after work, strictly against their terms of service. Gradually to alleviate these problems more and more of the land army lived in hostels like this one where they were properly fed.
LAND GIRLS GOING TO BED
And as we see in the second of her atmospheric glimpses into life in a WLA hostels they slept in dormitories — here one of them is applying face cream to ease the coarsening effect of her long exposure to the raw wind. But, coming back to the painting we looked at first, we find this documentary impulse though still present has now been pushed to one side.
A LAND GIRL AND THE BAIL BULL 1945
It took Dunbar three years to complete this –– her wartime masterpiece. A Land Girl and the Bail Bull, which was delivered to the War Artist Advisory Committee in 1945, a few weeks after the end of the European war. I now know that it is a dairy scene: the bail is the term for this –– a mobile milking unit, introduced for efficiency as it avoided bringing the cows back to the dairy twice daily for milking. The Land Girl is not involved in the milking as such. Her job is to deal with the bull perhaps to prevent him from disrupting the proceedings – something he is quite capable of doing. That is the documentary element of this painting, which puts it in accordance with the other often beautiful but also often briskly procedural paintings she had already done of the Land Army. And yet it is rather different: it has a compelling atmosphere of its own. It is significant that the Land Girl is alone. Previously almost all Dunbar’s Land Army paintings had shown the women working in teams and as part of the War Effort. Here the young woman's solitude or separateness is insisted on. The effect is to dramatise a confrontation between her and the bull which hints – subtly enough – at allegory, myth or story, rather in the line of those mythologies by Renaissance painters between humans and mythical creatures. But unlike the fables she had done for Brockley school there is nothing didactic or allegorical here. The encounter is allowed simply to be, and to honour the mystery of being.
Evelyn Dunbar SELF PORTRAIT 1958
After the war Dunbar – now married – continued working in her studio. But her moment of prominence was behind her and her work received less and less attention and (apparently by choice) she sold very little. Then in May 1960, at the age of 53, she suddenly collapsed while out on a walk with her husband, and died on the spot. The cause was coronary disease. As a Christian Scientist, she had given no indication –– and perhaps refused to recognize – that she might be suffering from a dangerous illness.
Except by those with a special interest in wartime art, she was forgotten or disregarded until –– in 2012 –– something remarkable happened. A painting by her turned up on television in the Antiques Roadshow, which prompted the discovery of a rich cache of canvases, studies, drawings and sketchbooks –– the whole contents of her studio as it had been at her death. It had all been stored away by a relative in an oast-house and forgotten. An exhibition at the Pallant Gallery in Chichester was then arranged and so the process of rehabilitating the reputation of this very notable and interesting artist began. I hope will continue.