page_title: Robert Bevan
section_title: Married life
hierarchical_section_title: Robert Bevan / Married life
caption_attribution_description: English: Breton Mother and Child
context_page_description: Robert Polhill Bevan was a British painter, draughtsman and lithographer. He was a founding member of the Camden Town Group, the London Group, and the Cumberland Market Group.
context_section_description: In the summer of 1897 Bevan met the Polish painter Stanisława de Karłowska at the wedding of Polish art student Janina Flamm with Eric Forbes-Robertson in Jersey. At the end of the year Bevan and de Karłowska married in Warsaw. Her father had extensive land in central Poland and for the remainder of their married life they would make long summer visits there.
  In 1900 the Bevans settled in London at 14 Adamson Road, Swiss Cottage. Their first child, Edith Halina (Mrs Charles Baty), had been born in December 1898 and their second, Robert Alexander, in March 1901.
  The summers of 1901, 1903 and 1904 were spent in Poland and it was here that some of his most colourful work was produced. The influence of Gauguin was a key role in Bevan's development, helping him to discover the pure colour which led him to a premature Fauvism in 1904. His Courtyard  of that year has been described as “one of the first exercises in the expressive use of pure colour in this century”. Bevan's early experiments in colour can also be seen in his The Mill Pool which recalls the Talisman picture that Sérusier painted to Gauguin's instructions and was described as being “quite different in colour and really rather superior”. However his first one-man exhibition in 1905, which contained probably the most radical paintings by a British artist at that time, was not a commercial success and was hardly noticed by the critics. "Bevan evidently lost confidence in the direction it pointed and never again produced so outstanding a painting of this type. Sir Philip Hendy, in his preface to the 1961 Bevan retrospective exhibition at Colnaghi's, commented that Bevan was perhaps the first Englishman to use pure colour in the 20th Century. He was certainly far in advance of his Camden Town colleagues in this respect."
  Bevan's second exhibition, in 1908, of largely Sussex scenes included the first of his paintings in the divisionist or pointillist style of which the best examples are Ploughing on the Downs (Aberdeen Art Gallery) and The Turn-Rice Plough (Yale Center for British Art).
  In the same year Bevan submitted five works to the first Allied Artists’ Association in London’s Albert Hall—a non-juried, subscription show founded by Frank Rutter to promote progressive artists and based on the French Salon des Indépendants. (Wassily Kandinsky showed in England for the first time at the second exhibition in 1909.)
  Having worked largely in isolation since returning from Pont-Aven, Bevan’s paintings were noticed by Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore and he was invited to join Walter Sickert’s Fitzroy Street Group. It was Sickert who encouraged him to "paint what really interests you and look around and see the beauty of everyday things". Thus began a series of paintings recording the decline of the horse cab trade, for example The Cab Horse (Tate gallery).
caption: Breton Mother and Child, c. 1894
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