Old Mother Hubbard, 1946

Old Mother Hubbard (1946) is a small but fascinating post-war work by the British painter Evelyn Dunbar. Dunbar is best known as the only woman employed full-time by the War Artists' Advisory Committee during the Second World War, producing memorable images of the Women's Land Army and civilian life on the home front. After the war, however, her work became increasingly personal, imaginative, and allegorical. Rather than documenting agricultural labour, she turned towards subjects drawn from literature, religion, folklore, childhood, and the natural world.

What makes Old Mother Hubbard particularly interesting is that it appears to transform a simple nursery-rhyme character into something richer and more symbolic. Dunbar often used familiar stories as a starting point for broader reflections on human experience. The image may allude to ideas of scarcity and domestic provision; themes that would have resonated strongly in Britain immediately after the war, when rationing and shortages were still part of everyday life.

Stylistically, the painting belongs to the distinctive post-war phase of Dunbar's work. Unlike the modernist experimentation of many of her contemporaries, Dunbar retained a figurative language rooted in observation while infusing it with symbolism. Her figures often possess a dreamlike stillness, and even when drawn from everyday life, they seem to inhabit a world where reality and myth overlap. Critics have described her art as pastoral yet deeply imaginative, combining close attention to nature with a taste for personification and storytelling.

One of the reasons Dunbar's post-war paintings have attracted increasing attention is that they reveal an artist whose ambitions extended far beyond her wartime reputation. Works such as Old Mother Hubbard demonstrate her interest in creating modern allegories from seemingly modest subjects. The painting is therefore less a literal illustration of a nursery rhyme than an example of her broader attempt to invest everyday British culture with symbolic and psychological depth. In the context of British art of the 1940s, Old Mother Hubbard can be seen as part of Dunbar's larger project: transforming familiar rural, domestic, and literary motifs into images that feel at once timeless, intimate, and subtly mysterious.