Section Officer Austen: WAAF meteorologist by Evelyn Dunbar, oil on canvas

Mural painter Evelyn Dunbar was the only female Official War Artist of the Second World War commissioned on a full time salary. Few female artists were commissioned even on a short-term basis and the majority of women's artworks accepted for the War Artists' Advisory Committee's (WAAC) scheme were selectively purchased. Out of 405 participating artists, only 52 were women (13 percent).

Dunbar was commissioned to paint Home Front subjects, including the work of the Women's Voluntary Service and Women's Land Army. Women artists were chosen primarily to represent 'women's work' in the war effort, which included subjects such as nursing, evacuating and rehoming bombed out families, farming and food production - domestic themes deemed an extension of the responsibilities and skills women were assumed to have as wives and mothers. However, as the war progressed, from December 1941, women artists enjoyed a broader range of themes to represent when unmarried women aged between 20 and 30 were subject to mandatory conscription, taking on a wider range of wartime roles, including those that had been the preserve of men. Dame Laura Knight, in her introduction to the National Gallery’s catalogue ‘War Pictures by British Artists: Women’ (1943), described this change, citing factory munitions production, war transport, balloon operating and meteorology as examples of women undertaking formerly male roles. Celebrating its emancipating effect, she acknowledged, ‘young girls face a life alien to their former outlook’. Now works were commissioned to encourage the recruitment of women for military service, extending the 'women's work' remit, even if female artists were still confined to it by the WAAC. From preliminary sketches made in-situ, Dunbar painted Women's Auxiliary Air Force meteorologist Section Officer Austen after visiting RAF Gravesend, nearby to where she lived in Strood. Dunbar had already familiarised herself with RAF life when in 1942 she married a Royal Auxiliary Air Force volunteer, Roger Folley, of No. 488 (N.Z.) Squadron, and accompanied him to postings around the UK before his transfer to Northern France. In meteorological offices WAAFs typically observed and recorded weather patterns while senior male officers forecasted conditions. However, Austen - represented plotting weather onto a map - as the station's senior Met Officer, oversaw forecasts and therefore influenced the RAF's operational strategies. As Knight explained, 'Many instances also can be given of women who have mastered the abstruse sciences of radio-location and meteorology. On such matters as these, not only the safety of our citizens, but the lives of our men in the air, on the sea, and on the land, depend.' From the Air Ministry allocation of works from the War Artists' Advisory Committee, 1947. Original accession number: LD5014. On loan from the RAF Air Historical Branch (MOD). Copyright: Crown (expired) / RAF Museum.