Ian Harrison discusses an Evelyn Dunbar  composition of 1944 which may be the first time that pruning, especially by women, has been the subject of a painting.

I came across the painting ‘A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling’ by Evelyn Dunbar last year (2009) in Brighton where it featured in the touring exhibition on the ‘Women’s Land Army during World War II’. This is a remarkable painting by any standards and it may well be unique, a subject not painted before. The painting, which is of orchards at East Malling Research Station in Kent, is held by Manchester City Art Gallery.

Evelyn Dunbar (1906-1960) spent most of her life in Kent. During World War II she became a war artist, her area of interest being food production and the Women’s Land Army. According to her biography she was a rather shy retiring person, a christian scientist by upbringing and personal conviction, which partly account for the fact that she is little known and appreciated compared with her contemporaries Roland Hilder, Eric Ravilious, Stanley Spencer and Edward Bawden.

The painting, oil on canvas, has a central panel surrounded by a frieze. The central panel divided into three planes places the viewer in between two rows of trees, bare of leaves, which converge near the distant horizon at the top-left of centre of the picture. The land and the structure of the two rows of trees make up the three planes.

The viewing point is from the top of a tripod ladder. Immediately to the right is the back of a woman pruning a tree from the top of another ladder, and beyond her, two more women reach into the trees they are pruning. A woman to the viewer’s left has just entered the frame carrying a tripod ladder. She leads the eye past the figures on the right, she does not stop to talk, she is moving into the picture to find the next tree to prune. Ahead of her to the left and right, stretching away to the point of infinity, other land girls are pruning trees or collecting prunings from the ground in sacking, to be removed and perhaps burnt for ash. Nothing must be wasted. The sky is overcast, grey winter light predominates, there is no sunshine. The women are all well wrapped against the cold winds. The woman entering on the left carrying her ladder provides the sense of energy and movement that enables the viewer to read the story of the picture.

There is a huge task being undertaken here, out of doors, in the midst of winter, pruning hundreds of trees. Energy and sustained disciplined work are essential to its successful accomplishment. The hours of daylight in which it can be done are very short in mid-winter, adding to the pressure of work. The displacement of the Land Girls along the rows of trees forms a triangle in the centre of the picture. The alternation of the tasks they are carrying out from pruning to carrying ladders, collecting prunings, reveals the full story of how the task is to be completed, by team work, sheer hard work and commitment.

But the very nature of the displacement of figures in the central panel over a great distance, means that the skilled work of hand-eye co-ordination needed to accomplish it cannot be brought closely into focus. Hence the necessity of the frieze, which shows in close-up, pictures of gloved hands holding pruning shears and saws. Curiously the pruning shears are all of the anvil type, there are no parrot’s beak or cross-over shears depicted. There are also plates of apples illustrated in the frieze, the blushes on their skins provides a visual key linking the central panel through the colour on some of the women’s scarves.

If this painting is unique, in that the act of painting has not been painted before, where did the artist get the model for the picture from, how did Evelyn Dunbar go about the task of conceiving the picture in order to tell a story? It should be borne in mind that traditionally women are shown undertaking menial tasks, weeding picking under watchful gaze of a male foreman. Here a whole team of women are carrying out skilled work in a time of war.

I think she drew on three traditions. The central panel draws on the discovery of perspective associated with the Renaissance in Italy, while the outer frieze follows earlier traditions, but both are used here for secular purposes. The other tradition is that developed in northern Europe of painting out of doors. A tradition which developed in England through the work of Turner and Constable and was developed still further by such painters as John Linnel and Samuel Palmer. The latter painted people out of doors in the area of Kent near East Malling, Shoreham and Eynsford. The problems of travel in the early 1800s obliged them to work mainly in the summer with a palette based on bright colours.

It was not until the last century that Roland Hilder (b 1905) shifted the emphasis to work on the land in the winter months, using the medium of water colour, to explore the qualities of light and earth pigments. This painting by Dunbar accomplishes the same task but using oil paint, and, can easily withstand comparison with the best of these artists. If you are in Manchester a visit to the City Art Gallery to view it and others of the period by her is recommended. The biography by Gill Clarke - Evelyn Dunbar War and Country - is an essential acquisition for anyone who wishes to know more about this artist and contains copies of many of her paintings, including this one.

For anyone interested in fruit related art there is a question posed by this painting: has an artist before or since Evelyn Dunbar depicted the subject of pruning, either as a woodblock print engraving or painting?

To return to that title - ‘A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling’ - there is something more to its story. The picture was conceived and sketched first at East Malling Research Station in December 1944. The allies had landed successfully in Normandy, the task of food production was essential to the war effort. The war in Europe ended on 8 May the following year. The apples borne on the trees being pruned would be the fruits of victory. Viewed this way the painting is not only unique, it is a very subtle piece of agricultural propaganda, truly a painting of its time.

 Ian Harrison

‘A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling’ by Evelyn Dunbar reproduced with permission from Evelyn Dunbar; War and Country by Gill Clarke, published 2006 by Sanson and Company Ltd

Fruit Forum also thanks Manchester City Art Gallery for permission to use this image, which is provided for personal study only and not for commercial use.