Robert Bevan

P & D Colnaghi & Co. London,  where bought by Sir David Scott in March 1959 for £32.11.0

London, P & D Colnaghi and Co Ltd, An Exhibition of Drawings and Lithographs by Robert Bevan, 6-10 March 1959, no.50.

Frances Stenlake, Robert Bevan - from Gaugin to Camden Town, 2008, pp. 126-127, 131;
Sotheby's, Pictures from the Collection of Sir David and Lady Scott, 2008, pp. 182-183.

STRUCTURE The work is on wove paper which has not been laid down. The sheet is attached to the mount with pieces of tape along the upper edge. The edges of the sheet have traces of dirt but these are disguised by the mount. The sheet is otherwise in good overall condition. SURFACE The surface of the sheet is in good overall condition. FRAME Held under glass in a simple rectilinear wooden frame.
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Born in Hove into a relatively prosperous middle-class family, Bevan grew up near Cuckfield in Sussex. He studied at Westminster School of Art under Fred Brown and then at the Academie Julian in Paris. In the early 1890s he travelled in Spain and Morocco, some of the time in company with the Scottish artists Joseph Crawhall and George Denholm Armour, and in 1893-4 worked in Pont-Aven where he knew and was influenced by Gauguin.

He married the Polish painter Stanislawa de Karlowska in 1897 and between 1899 and 1904 made prolonged visits to her family. Always very much a countryman at heart, Bevan's natural affinity with rural life and subjects meant that the Polish countryside provided a wide range of subjects and he produced copious paintings, drawings and lithographs derived from these trips.

His first one-man exhibition at the Baillie Gallery in 1905 included many of these paintings but one, The Courtyard of 1904, marked a distinct shift in his work towards a stronger, more Fauvist palette. The painting was singled out by the critics in vituperative reviews, and the effect on Bevan was marked. Often a rather insular painter, and with no immediate peers to help him with this negative reception to his work, Bevan withdrew from the mainstream of the art world and it was not until 1908 that he began showing again. His submissions to the inaugural Allied Artists Association of that year led to his becoming close to Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman finding a like-minded circle.

Sickert's influence in the urban subject matter of this group was important for Bevan, and his love of the horse found perfect inspiration in the horse-dealers, auctioneers and cab-yards of the city, and it is for these works that he has become best known. The body of sketchbooks given to the Ashmolean Museum by the artist's family show a huge range of studies not only of the horses but also the characters that populate the paintings and give them their very distinct character. These sketches provided the base materials for the more finished drawings, such as the present watercolour, and whilst many compositions also became paintings, the combination of Bevan's distinctive outline drawing and subtle handling of shade and colour allows these works to stand out in his oeuvre.

From 1912 onwards, Bevan spent increasingly long periods of time in the Devon countryside, moving there permanently in 1916. As with many of his circle, Bevan's work was mostly unregarded after the 1920s, and the first major reappraisal of his career came in 1956 when the Arts Council held a retrospective exhibition, in which The Horse Dealers was included. However, since that time, the unique contribution of Bevan and his fellows to British art in the pre-WWI period has been widely recognised.

A reversed pencil sketch for Horse Dealers is in the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Centre for British Art.