The rest of my life: Down to the South Coast

The Christmas holidays continue in our household of two retired persons and one groovy young Londoner with two weeks leave. Time to head for the sea to visit S&N have and more fun.

First stop is the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, which is one of our favourite galleries and a special request of J. It is located in an original Queen Anne, grade I listed town-house as well as a new wing, which has quadrupled the exhibition space.

http://www.pallant.org.uk/

The Gallery's collection of British Modern Art is described as one of the best in the UK, with important works by Gino Severini , Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Patrick Caulfield, Michael Andrews, Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton.

The exhibitions today are about David Jones, a pupil of Eric Gill and the very interesting Evelyn Dunbar, the only female war artist. This is a remarkable collection of lost works discovered in the attic of a Kent Coast house.

Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook. 1940.

This lovely painting was created in the long, hot summer of 1940, when so often the skies of southern England were criss-crossed with trails from RAF Spitfires and Hurricanes defending the homeland. The Land Girls of the Women’s Land Army are marching with the men, and have turned the task of stooking into a military operation, mirroring the men on the right. However, the Land Girl on the left, who appears to be giving the orders, has tucked her left hand behind her back into the crook of her right elbow in a definitely non-military pose, a touch of a gentle feminist subversion often observable in Dunbar’s war paintings. Strangely, this painting was not accepted by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee.

Evelyn Dunbar (1906-1960) was a gifted draughtswoman and brilliant student at the Royal College of Art; principal muralist at Brockley School; book illustrator; devout Christian Scientist; official World War 2 artist, the only woman artist to be salaried throughout the war, post-war allegorist and much-loved teacher; subtly insistent feminist, devoted gardener and inspired advocate of 'green' values. She apparently had a warm and witty but self-effacing personality and many accomplishments including rock-climbing and playing the banjo. Above all she was all a very individual artist, whose work, which hangs in all major UK galleries and several overseas, defies ready classification.

Born in Reading, Berkshire, into a merchant family, Evelyn Dunbar moved in childhood to Kent, where she lived for most of her life. Having been appointed Official War Artist in 1940, She quickly became associated with the Women's Land Army. Her remit to record women's home front activities also allowed her to promote a gentle and unaggressive feminism.

In 1940 she met and married Roger Folley, then an RAF officer but later to become a leading horticultural economist. Their common interests and convictions encouraged Evelyn, after the war, to concentrate on a series of allegorical paintings and drawings which reflected her beliefs, and also her debt to Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaëlites, whose ideas about the function of art and the place of narrative in painting she acknowledged as strongly influential.

Evelyn died suddenly at the age of 53, leaving behind a studio collection of some 800 works, major and minor, which only came to light in 2013, and which we are thrilled to view today.

Now it is time to head off to for lunch and a catch up with S and N, not to mention the lovely Joseph the Border Collie, aged 2. After lunch we set off to experience the windy English Channel.