Woman war artists: Evelyn Dunbar

Evelyn Dunbar was born in Reading (1906-1960), daughter of tailor William and amateur artist Florence. Evelyn had been employed since April 1940 as an artist working for the Ministry of Information; Roger was already serving with the Royal Air Force Voluntary Reserve. Throughout the war years it had been Evelyn's intention to paint her husband's portrait, but as with many marriages in wartime, their union was more marked by separation than by being together. In Jan 1943 she arrived in Usk Wales to record the work of the Women’s Land Army. This civilian organisation mobilised women to work in agriculture & other jobs, filling labour gaps left by men gone to the military.

women workers busy knitting on the train.

Stand-by Train 21, by Dunbar, 1941

Imperial War Museum

 

Milking Practice with Artificial Udders, 1940, 

Liss Llewellyn Fine Art 

Evelyn was the only salaried woman war artist, appointed to record Land Girls working on the home front. The women may not have been driving tanks into battle fields or shooting enemy soldiers, but they were giving up family life to work for the nation while their husbands were away. In Dunbar’s artworks, there was a recurring theme of women adapting to unfamiliar work and environs as both the war and technology shaped lives: ambulance drivers were assisted into anti-gas protective clothing as their bodies became cumbersome and strange; women learnt to milk cows using mechanical dummy machines; and tailors prepared war garments. Baling Hay 1940 showed a crucial role of women in WW2; the WLA ensured continued food production for the British population at a time when imported supplies were severely compromised.

Baling Hay, 1940 

Museum Wales

The management of food supplies and consumption, particularly via rationing of essentials, was introduced as soon as WW2 started. Fish supplies were affected as the Royal Navy requisitioned much of the fishing fleet; the German navy in the North Sea restricted the remaining east coast fleets. The shopping queue was a symbol of this change and also part of the difficult process of adapting to the new, daily rituals. Although fresh fish was under-supplied and very expensive, being perishable it was never rationed. So The Queue at the Fish Bar 1944 was always long; even air raids didn’t deter them. Dunbar’s canvas size emphasised the length of the queue and her details showed the shoppers’ determination as they carried their empty baskets and the fishmonger ran the stall. Social conventions (eg chats) held the queue together.

The Queue at the Fish Bar, 1944
Imperial War Museum, London

Dunbar contrasted the duties of the population at war. The sign of abundance on the shop was read against the reality of the queue. She made clear who was expected to queue, women and older men, and who will have their meals served to them. The serviceman riding past and the service women facing outward had to attend more urgent business. But civilians weren’t rushing; just queueing.

A final war painting was A Land Girl and the Bail Bull, 1945, painted when husband Roger was away serving with the RAF. It was a Land Girl's at work with an outdoor dairy herd on the Hampshire Downs. The bail was the movable shed where the milking was done. Soon after dawn in the early summer the girl had to catch and tether the bull, entice him with a bucket of fodder and hide the chain behind her, ready to snap on his nose-ring, a delicate, dangerous job. The model for the land girl was her Evelyn’s sister Jessie, who posed for her several times but with her wounded eye averted.

A Land Girl and the Bail Bull , 1945 

Tate

Post-war Evelyn settled into rural Kent and painted a great deal until her death. But didn’t exhibit much and only sold one or two commissions. The final version of the painting was on an easel in her Kent studio when she died. After its appearance on Antiques Roadshow, its owner donated the painting to Dunbar’s local gallery, Maidstone Museum, which in turn loaned the picture to Pallant House in Chichester.

Not all Evelyn Dunbar’s works have been rediscovered; some wartime paintings remain lost. Still, there has been enough newly rediscovered work to be going on with. What will happen to her work when the 2026 show finishes?

Her war works had hung in Tate Britain and Imperial War Museum. In 2015 Pallant House Gallery staged a show called Evelyn Dunbar: The Lost Works, featuring much of Ro’s hoard. It is the first big retrospective of an artist who has certainly been neglected and perhaps misunderstood since her death. The exhibition includes the paintings for which she is best known: her WW2 commissions of the Women’s Land Army at work, such as Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook. She was a war artist but she didn’t paint horror like some other war artists eg Doris Zinkeisen painted Human Laundry, an image of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp’s starving bodies. 

Accidentally seeing Aunt Evelyn Dunbar’s art on a 2013 TV Antique programme fascinated her niece Ro Dunbar. Ro remembered her farmhouse attic in Kent had a tightly bound collection of artworks Evelyn’s husband Roger Folley left after his wife’s death. “I had no idea what was there. I thought it might all be paintings by Evelyn’s mother, Florence.” But when Ro looked, there was a whole hoard of works by Evelyn, the woman described as a genius by Sir William Rothenstein, Principal of Royal College of Art where she’d studied.

Another cousin, Christopher Campbell-Howes, was compiling a record of her paintings. So when Ro told him about some art in her attic, he flew over from France where he lived. When he saw them, he was shocked. What had been languishing in Ro’s attic for 50 years were 500+ art works, and overnight it doubled Dunbar’s known oeuvre. For 20 years, Campbell-Howes had been tracking the contents of Evelyn’s Lost Studio, dismantled after her 1960 death, its contents sold or given to family, collecting dust in Ro’s loft.