Evelyn Dunbar

(British, 1906-1960)

Opportunity 61 x 61 cm. (24 x 24 in.) (canvas); 53.3 cm. (21 in.) diameter (image)

Footnotes

Provenance
Harold Jeppe, by whom acquired from the New English Art Club exhibition in 1936
Private Collection, South Africa

Exhibited
London, New English Art Club, Winter 1936

In late 1932 Evelyn Dunbar, then a postgraduate student at the Royal College of Art, was invited by her mural tutor Charles Mahoney to join him and other recent graduates to paint a series of murals at Brockley County School for Boys (now Prendergast-Hilly Fields School) in Lewisham. Dunbar jumped at the opportunity of such a commission at the start of her career, although the question of remuneration was suspiciously vague. It would mean working on extensive surfaces, a challenge she found very exciting. It would also mean working alongside Mahoney, three years her senior and a man she had grown to like and admire.

Work started in the summer of 1933. Only two other team members could be found; they worked for a few weeks in early 1934. Otherwise Dunbar and Mahoney worked alone, quickly forming a close relationship, professional and personal. The project was initially restricted to the school hall, but on Dunbar's cheerful initiative it grew to include the adjoining arcade and its ceiling. We can imagine that in due course Mahoney, whose project it was, felt sidelined; compromised, too, by Dunbar's demands for a closer union, often expressed in sumptuously illustrated letters. Mahoney abandoned the project in May 1935, his final contribution, after two hall panels and some lesser work, being a grisaille decoration surrounding the ceiling roundels Dunbar was due to complete. She worked on alone, her sequence of 22 smaller arcade panels hinting at an increasingly fractured relationship. She did her best to maintain her convictions, repeatedly suggesting to Mahoney what professional and personal opportunities lay before them if they worked and lived as a couple. The appearance of children in Opportunity is maybe a further element of Dunbar's attempts at persuasion, but Mahoney was not interested, and said so: children would stunt their individual careers. They separated, reasonably amicably, in 1937.

Like much of Dunbar's work, Opportunity is a strongly coded personal statement. The roundel form echoes the latest image on which Dunbar and Mahoney worked together at Brockley. The sunflower in Opportunity's splendid hat refers to Mahoney's obsession with sunflowers, and thus targets him directly. Ladders occasionally feature in Dunbar's work. Almost invariably the top is somewhere undefined, outside the frame. Not so here: uniquely, we are allowed - just - to see the top, and maybe Dunbar has realised, with a heavy heart, that the opportunities she envisaged were not limitless.

After a long gestation of sketches and studies - as in Dunbar's letter above - the final, definitive Opportunity was sold for 15gns at the New English Art Club 1936 winter exhibition. It was bought by Harold Jeppe, a remarkable South African Olympian athlete, businessman and art patron, who later became a director of the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

We are grateful to Christopher Campbell-Howes, author of Evelyn Dunbar, A Life in Painting, for compiling this catalogue entry.