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Autumn and the Poet (study) chalk pastel on board (Dimensions: 54 x 75cm )(54 x 75cm )Footnote: Provenance The Artist, by whom gifted to Margaret Lliffe née Goodwin, by descent within the family Sale; TW Gaze, Diss, Suffolk, June 2011, where purchased by the present owner We are grateful to Dr Gill Clarke for her assistance with cataloguing this lot.Evelyn Dunbar (1906-60) was part of a neglected generation of artists whose lives and artistic output are now being reappraised and their contribution to the practice and spirit of twentieth century British art duly recognised. Dunbar had a profound understanding and love of the countryside and it is notable that she was the only woman commissioned, on a salaried basis, to record women’s activities on the Home Front during the Second World War. These works for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee and in particular her lyrical, yet unsentimental paintings of the Women’s Land Army provide an important documentary record of women’s contribution to the war effort.   Post war Dunbar gave more reign to her imagination and allegorical work and while living in the small village of Enstone and employed as a visiting teacher at The Ruskin School in nearby Oxford commenced work on Autumn and the Poet. Perhaps her most significant allegorical painting Autumn and the Poet was finally finished in her studio at Staple Farm, near Wye, Kent during 1958-59 having absorbed her intermittently for the previous 10 years or so. This present work is one of a number of preparatory depictions for Autumn and the Poet. The two figures symbolise “Autumn and the Poet” and are set against a backdrop of verdant Cotswold countryside at harvest time. Dunbar used her husband Roger Folley, an agricultural economist as her model for the poet, the completed work now in Maidstone Museum interestingly shows ‘the Poet’ reclining rather than seated. Much else remains the same including as here the mellow colours which convey the feeling of autumn glow as the light begins to fade. In Autumn’s right hand is gripped a long white sheet which bears the fruits of the earth, a comment on life brought to fruition. There is a sense of time passing and like the seasons, it comes full circle. Although the seasons and nature endure, Dunbar, a Christian Scientist may have had a sense of her own life coming to an end, and her inner thoughts to this effect are fused deep within the contours of the painting. She died suddenly within a year of finishing the painting. Evelyn Dunbar had signed Autumn and the Poet,a mark that it was completed.  Gill Clarke author of Evelyn Dunbar War and Country published by Sansom & Company.

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