In Tate Britain
Walk Through British Art: 1940
Free entry- Artist
- Evelyn Dunbar 1906–1960
- Medium
- Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions
- Support: 914 x 1829 mm
frame: 1085 x 2000 x 80 mm - Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by the War Artists Advisory Committee 1946
- Reference
- N05688
Display caption
Dunbar was working as a mural painter before she was appointed an Official War Artist in 1940. She was commissioned to record the ‘Land Army’ at work. This picture, she said, was ‘painted at Strood towards the end of the war, about 1944-5. It is an imaginative painting of a Land Girl’s work with an outdoor dairy herd on the Hampshire Downs. The bail is the moveable shed where the milking is done ... the girl has to catch and tether the bull: she entices him with a bucket of fodder and hides the chain behind her, ready to snap on to the ring in his nose as soon as it is within her reach.’
Gallery label, June 2018
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Catalogue entry
N05688 A LAND GIRL AND THE BAIL BULL 1945
Inscr. ‘Evelyn Dunbar 45’ b.r.
Canvas, 36×72 (91×183).
Presented by the War Artists' Advisory Committee 1946.
Exh: National War Pictures, R.A., October–November 1945 (981).
The artist wrote (7 May 1956): ‘Painted at Strood towards the end of the war, about 1944–5. It is an imaginative painting of a Land Girl's work with an outdoor dairy herd on the Hampshire Downs. The bail is the movable shed where the milking is done. Soon after dawn in the early summer the girl has to catch and tether the bull: she entices him with a bucket of fodder and hides the chain behind her, ready to snap on to the ring in his nose as soon as it is within her reach - a delicate and dangerous job.’
Published in:
Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, I
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