page_title: Evelyn Dunbar
section_title: World War Two
hierarchical_section_title: Evelyn Dunbar / World War Two
caption_attribution_description: English: A large queue outside the fishmongers H.Hill and Son awaiting a delivery. A RAF on a bike is to the left, the head of a central figure looks to the viewer and a women is crossing the road to the right.
context_page_description: Evelyn Mary Dunbar was a British artist, illustrator and teacher. She is notable for recording women's contributions to World War II on the United Kingdom home front, particularly the work of the Women's Land Army. She was the only woman working for the War Artists' Advisory Committee on a full-time salaried basis. Dunbar had a deep devotion to nature and a particular affection for the landscape of Kent. Dunbar was modest regarding her achievements and outside of the post-war mainstream art world which has led to some neglect of her work until recent years. She painted murals at Brockley County Secondary School, and was a member of the Society of Mural Painters. After the war she painted portraits, allegorical pictures and especially landscapes. She attempted a return to mural painting in 1958 with a commission at Bletchley Park Teacher Training College, but was unable to fulfil the original specification.
context_section_description: In April 1940 Dunbar was appointed by the War Artists' Advisory Committee, WAAC, as an official war artist, eventually becoming the only woman artist to receive successive and continuous salaried commissions throughout the war. Her brief was to record civilian contributions to the war effort on the home front. Her initial subjects were the activities of the Women's Voluntary Service, WVS, and later in the war, the Women's Land Army. By the end of the war Dunbar had some forty paintings accepted by WAAC.
  Dunbar's early war-time paintings included,
  Putting on Anti-Gas Protective Clothing In July 1940 the Tate Gallery included this compartment painting in an exhibition of wartime art and it was also included in the Britain at War exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York the following year.
  Milking Practice with Artificial Udders, – submitted to WAAC in September 1940.
  Women's Land Army Dairy Training Dunbar's visits to Sparsholt Farm Institute resulted in this dairy scene in which a Land Army recruit, modelled by an actual recruit called José Loosemore, learns to roll a milk-churn on the rim of its base.
  By November 1940, after the first harvest which the Women's Land Army was largely responsible for bringing in, Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook had been painted, and WVS exploitation of that summer's excellent fruit crop was recognised in A Canning Demonstration. Among her November 1940 submissions to the WAAC was A Knitting Party, painted in the drawing room of the Dunbar house in Rochester and featuring some fifteen women, including Dunbar's mother Florence (the hatless woman, surreptitiously looking at her watch), knitting blankets or comforters in service colours.
  In autumn 1940 Dunbar met Roger Folley (1912–2008) whom she would marry in August 1942. Folley, from Lancashire, was an agricultural economist who had worked and lived on site at Sparsholt Farm Institute as Costings Officer. As a Royal Auxiliary Air Force volunteer, he was called up to serve in the RAF in August 1939, receiving his Flying Officer commission in 1941.
  Dunbar completed her hospital and nursing paintings in the winter of 1940–41. Hospital Train and Standing by on Train 21 are accounts of the emergency measures taken to relieve victims of the Blitz. A year later she completed St Thomas's Hospital in Evacuation Quarters, spending some weeks in Pyrford, Surrey, where the London hospital had been evacuated to. Dunbar's observation of hospital nursing activities is contained in a rectilinear mosaic of some 11 detailed vignettes.
  A WAAC maintenance allowance gave Dunbar some freedom to travel and as her relationship with Folley grew, she often followed his various RAF postings. Folley's posting to a RAF training centre near Bristol resulted in several paintings of WLA activities in Usk, in nearby Monmouthshire, among them Sprout Picking, Monmouthshire.
  Further training for Folley at RAF Charter Hall, Berwickshire, led Dunbar to the Scottish Borders, where she made the initial sketches for Potato Sorting, Berwick and two studies of WLA off-duty life, Women's Land Army Hostel and Land Army Girls going to Bed. The uniquely titled Singling Turnips is the fourth of her Berwickshire quartet. An Army Tailor and an ATS Tailoress (1943) captures a collective mood of deep concentration among her subjects as they sew new uniforms.
  For the later years of the war Dunbar worked mainly from her studio in Rochester. Ministry of Defence authorisation to enter RAF South Cerney enabled the completion of Dunbar's only formal portrait in her WAAC work: Portrait of an Airwoman,(1944), now in the RAF Museum, Hendon. The subject, in Women's Auxiliary Air Force uniform, with a Good Conduct chevron on her left cuff, is unknown. Also in the RAF Museum, Hendon, is Section Officer Austen, Women's Auxiliary Air Force Meteorologist (1944), portrayed working at RAF Gravesend. By December of that year work was well advanced on A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling, an imaginatively composed study of apple tree pruning and pruning equipment at the East Ma
caption: The Queue at the Fish-shop (Art.IWM ART LD 3987)
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