Combined in Evelyn Dunbar's work is a preference for working on a large scale and picturing sweeping perspectives (she was a member of the Society of Mural Painters), with a botanist's eye for minute detail. Dunbar trained at Rochester and Chelsea Schools of Art, and then at the Royal College of Art from 1929 to 1933. In her final year as a student she began a series of murals at Brockley County School for Boys (now the Prendergast School). The paintings, which are still in place, show the school in the far distance, boys clambering down steps towards it. Foliage and flowers in the foreground are painted with delicate precision.
In 1939 Dunbar was about to open an art gallery when the outbreak of war put a stop to her plans. Dunbar traveled the country painting women's activities, particularly those of the Women's Land Army. She described working on A Land CM and the Bail Bull, which she painted in just four months, in a letter of 1945 (Imperial War Museum Archive): 'All the observation had to be done before 5am and once we did an all night journey of about 100 miles to the farm where the idea came into being, arriving at 4 o'clock in the morning, and came back the next day!' In Landgirls Going to Bed of 1943, one of her paintings in the Imperial War Museum, the viewer looks down from the top of a bunk bed on women absorbed in their preparations.
After the war Dunbar joined the New English Art Club, and from 1950 taught at the Ruskin School of Drawing. During the last two years of her life she painted murals at Bletchley Training College. An exhibition of her work is being planned by the Imperial War Museum. |
