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Evelyn Dunbar
(1906 - 1960)
Self-portrait, c. 1927
![Evelyn Dunbar - Colour sketch for the Hilly Fields mural frieze at Brockley County School for Boys [HMO 525]](https://i0.wp.com/lissllewellyn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Evelyn-Dunbar-Colour-sketch-for-the-Hilly-Fields-mural-frieze-at-Brockley-County-School-for-Boys-HMO-525.jpg?fit=1500%2C939&ssl=1)
Evelyn Dunbar (1906 - 1960)
£2,875
Size:
Height – 30.5cm
Width – 50.8cm
1 in stock
Exhibited: Evelyn Dunbar – The Lost Works, Pallant House Gallery, October 2015 – February 2016, cat 19. Literature: Evelyn Dunbar – The Lost Works, eds Sacha Llewellyn & Paul Liss, July 2015, cat. 19, page 52; Evelyn Dunbar: A Life in Painting, Christopher Campbell-Howes, October 2016, pages 93-168. The chosen theme for the hall panels was Aesop’s Fables, which gave scope for narrative themes in landscape settings. Having completed The Country Girl and the Pail of Milk, one of the five large arched panels, Dunbar turned her attention to the enclosed balcony and the possibility of painting a frieze along its 12 metre length. After several experiments in proportion she produced a panorama of Hilly Fields, the area surrounding the school, composing a visual encyclopedia of 1930s suburbia with the foreground featuring the mostly innocent activities of Brockley schoolboys on their way home from school. Dunbar’s initial water-colour sketchwork was made from the top of a nearby water-tower, in which she was wedged between the water tank and a tiny dormer window; interviewed by The Kent Messenger in 1935 she remembered that in this cramped space in the summer heat of 1933 the water in her paint jar nearly boiled’.
We are grateful to Christopher Campbell-Howes for assistance.
Evelyn Dunbar studied at Rochester School of Art, Chelsea School
of Art (1927) and the Royal College of Art (1929’33). She painted
murals from 1933 -36 at Brockley School, a collaboration with her
RCA tutor (and lover) Cyril Mahoney (1903’1968) and in 1937
they wrote and illustrated together Gardeners’ Choice.
In 1938 she set up the Blue Gallery in Rochester, exhibiting her
own work alongside that of Edward Bawden (1903’1989) and
Barnett Freedman (1901’1958) and others. In 1940 she was
appointed an official war artist, becoming the only woman (amongst
36 men) to be given a full time salaried position by the WAAC.
She held her only solo exhibition at Withersdane, Wye, Kent
in 1953, although the WAAC included numerous pieces in touring
exhibitions ranging from Aberdeen Art Gallery to MOMA, New York.
A posthumous exhibition was held in 2006 at St Barbe
Museum and Art Gallery, and in 2015 Liss Llewellyn mounted a
major retrospective of her recently rediscovered studio at Pallant
House Gallery.
![Evelyn Dunbar - Study II for designs for an embroidered quilt [HMO 689]](https://i0.wp.com/lissllewellyn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Evelyn-Dunbar-Study-II-for-designs-for-an-embroidered-quilt-HMO-689.jpg?fit=791%2C1024&ssl=1)
![Evelyn Dunbar - Study I for designs for an embroidered quilt [HMO 689]](https://i0.wp.com/lissllewellyn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Evelyn-Dunbar-Study-I-for-designs-for-an-embroidered-quilt-HMO-689.jpg?fit=676%2C1024&ssl=1)
![Evelyn Dunbar - Colour study for sub-gallery spandrels at Brockley County School for Boys [HMO 551]](https://i0.wp.com/lissllewellyn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Evelyn-Dunbar-Colour-study-for-sub-gallery-spandrels-at-Brockley-County-School-for-Boys-HMO-551.jpg?fit=800%2C532&ssl=1)
