Sunday 20 January 2013

Wye from Olantigh (1953)

Evelyn Dunbar Wye from Olantigh 1953 (14" x 18": 35.5 x 45.8cm) Private collection

 Evelyn produced this most finished of her known landscapes in time for her only solo exhibition, held in the autumn of 1953 in Swanley Hall, Withersdane, a residential and administrative premises of Wye College. The exhibition was entitled 'Evelyn Dunbar - Paintings and Drawings 1938-1953'. There were 26 exhibits in all, many borrowed back from the Imperial War Museum, from other galleries and from private individuals to whom she had given or sold paintings. Her multi-frame An English Calendar was already there.

Olantigh is an estate a mile or two north of Wye, in Kent. We're in early summer, most likely of 1953. It wasn't a commission. It was painted for no other  - or better? - purpose than of recording a scene which pleased her. She may have had its eventual sale in mind, although Wye from Olantigh isn't signed. In the early 50s Evelyn had a loose arrangement with a London dealer, but her delivery of work was so erratic that the arrangement petered out. As always with a painting that particularly pleased her or which stated something important to her, she devoted a great deal of time, sometimes years, to finishing a canvas, that is - in Evelyn's case - giving it a depth of paint to exclude any suggestion of the canvas beneath. Certainly in Wye from Olantigh she has taken time to build up the relative thicknesses of layers of greens and yellows to express the intensity of the midday sun on the lush pastures of May in Kent, the Garden of England, although the outer branches and foliage do not have the same precision as, say, in A Land Girl and the Bail Bull.

These trees, beeches, oak and elm, are in full and proud leaf. Elm would disappear some 15 years later, victim of the Dutch elm disease which progressively destroyed all mature British elms as it moved northwards. The same view today would have several gaps in it, including the repoussoir trees on the left and right edges which lead the viewer's eye downwards towards the cattle in a shady nook and the blue-grey silhouette of the squat tower and nave of Wye Church, maybe half a mile away. A magical touch, worked with the tiniest of brushes, is the outline of the tower of Ashford Church on the horizon, some eight miles away in the heat haze. 

Pure landscape is one of the least known of Evelyn's activities. By 'pure' I mean landscape undertaken for the pleasure of recording it, not as the moral and symbolic backdrop against which so many of her outdoor dramas, especially the allegories and her wartime Women's Land Army paintings, are played out. Her pure landscapes, like Wye from Olantigh, are simply unadorned and unsentimental portraits of 'a landscape loved and worked in equal measure'. They are invariably - as far as I know: so much may be lost - of The Weald, that area of mostly fertile farmland and woodland of Kent and Sussex cradled by the North and South Downs.

In a sense her landscapes are the small change of her output. I suspect she gave many away as mementoes to friends or pupils. In an earlier essay I mentioned Evelyn's obituary in The Times, which presumably for lack of more accurate information claimed that after World War 2 she painted little but was 'absorbed in country pursuits'. I've sometimes wondered what the obituarist meant. Did she ride to hounds, make corn dollies, breed pheasants or angle for eels in the river Stour? (None of these sounds remotely like Evelyn.)

However country walks were a staple of her existence, and on the many country walks I remember sharing with her she was never without pencil, charcoal sticks and sketchbook. She would often stop to set down a field gate, a clump of trees, the set of some coppiced hazels, a bramble thicket, some middle-distance roof-tops, whatever.

This was her often daily communion with the land she loved. If there was something that especially took her eye she would return later, with easel and water-colours. Some artists feel a need continually, over and over again, to draw or paint a person they love, in all lights and circumstances and moods: with Evelyn it was the land. There was no need for the spectacular, snow- or cloud-capped mountains, waterfalls, rough seas; nor for anything chocolate-box or postcard-worthy, cottages with roses round the door, shepherd's delights: the Wealden landscape was enough and more.




(Text © Christopher Campbell-Howes 2013. All rights reserved)

Further reading...

EVELYN DUNBAR : A LIFE IN PAINTING
by Christopher Campbell-Howes

is available to order online from:

Casemate Publishing | Amazon UK | Amazon US

448 pages, 301 illustrations. RRP £30
 






1 comment:

  1. The view from Olantigh looks very much as it did thirty years ago from within the Olantigh Estate parkland to the east of Olantigh Road.

    Sidelands looks much as I remember the fields up Occupation Road and just below the tree line looking east up to the hill with Crown above wye

    ReplyDelete