Robert Polhill Bevan (1865-1925)
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Robert Polhill Bevan (1865-1925)

Crocks

Details
Robert Polhill Bevan (1865-1925)
Crocks
signed 'Robert Bevan' (lower right)
oil on canvas
25 x 30 in. (63.5 x 76.2 cm.)
Painted in 1922.
Provenance
The artist's son, R.A. Bevan, from whom purchased by the present owner in 1965.
Literature
F. Gordon Roe, The British Racehorse, The Adventurous Robert Bevan, July 1958, pp. 114-120.
R.A. Bevan, Robert Bevan, a Memoir by his Son, London, 1965, no. 78, illustrated.
J. Cornforth, Country Life, CXXXVII, Bevan's farewell to the horse, 25 March 1965, p. 677, illustrated.
Apollo, LXXXVI, March 1965, p. xliv, illustrated.
Burlington Magazine, CVII, March 1965, p. lx, illustrated.
The Connoisseur, 158, March 1965, p. xxxvi, illustrated.
The Studio, 169, March 1965, p. viii, illustrated.
P. Synge-Hutchinson, The Connoisseur, A Revaluation of The Camden Town Group, March 1967, p. 167.
'A Passage to Camden', Evening Standard, 7 July 1988, p. 31.
F. Stenlake, From Cuckfield to Camden Town the story of an artist, Cuckfield, 1999, p. 39.
Exhibited
London, New English Art Club, 71st Exhibition, January - February 1925, no. 47.
London, Goupil Gallery, Robert Bevan Memorial Exhibition, February 1926, no. 151.
Brighton, Public Art Galleries, Robert Bevan Memorial Exhibition, August 1926, no. 32.
London, National Gallery, British Painting since Whistler, 1940, no. 168.
London, C.E.M.A., Camden Town Group, 1944, no. 4.
Southampton, City Art Gallery, Robert Bevan, 1951, no. 14.
Arts Council of Great Britain, The Camden Town Group, touring exhibition, 1953, no. 11.
London, Colnaghi, Robert Bevan Centenary Exhibition, March - April 1965, no. 49; this exhibition toured to Oxford, Ashmolean Museum April - May 1965.
London, William Ware Gallery, The Camden Town Group and English Painting 1900 - 1930s, 1967, no. 6.
London, Christie's, The Painters of Camden Town 1905 - 1920, January 1988, no. 62.
Special notice
No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium, which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

Lot Essay

Robert Bevan was one of the most gifted and individual painters of the vital period of artistic change that affected British Art in the first quarter of the Twentieth Century. He studied in London at the Westminster School of Art in 1888 under Fred Brown and then at the Académie Julian in Paris (from 1889 until 1890), the school that had nurtured the Nabis style of Bonnard, Vuillard and Denis. In 1891 he visited Spain and studied Velazquez and Goya and also visited Tangiers with Joseph Crawhall and George Denholm Armour. In 1890-91 and 1893-94 he lived in Pont Aven where on his second visit he met Gauguin and Renoir and saw the work of Cézanne. It was Gauguin and the Pont Aven aesthetic which provided the most important impetus to his work, furthering his use of expressive form and colour. When he returned to England later in the 1890s this influence from Gauguin was later to have a marked effect on the course of British Painting, particularly after 1911 when Bevan, along with Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman, Walter Sickert and Charles Ginner founded The Camden Town Group, an assortment of avant-garde London-based post-impressionist painters. Soon to be joined by Wyndham Lewis, Lucien Pissarro, Augustus John and Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, this diverse group of talented artists together contributed to the foundation of The Modern Movement in Britain. The society had sixteen members and the purpose was to enable artists to show and sell their work, incidentally by-passing the dealers. Extraordinary, though it seems today, women were excluded to keep the standard high and a review of the constitution was to be made every five years. In the event, the group held only three exhibitions, in June and December 1911 and December 1912. In 1913 its existence was replaced by the London Group which Bevan also co-founded.

Bevan exhibited a picture titled Crocks at the first exhibition of the Camden Town Group in the basement Carfax Gallery in June 1911, (catalogue number 28). Horses, in particular urban horses, were one of his favourite subjects and they inspired some of his most significant work. Three of the four pictures he exhibited were cabyard scenes; one being The Cab Horse (Putting To), circa 1910 (Tate, London), London showing a cab horse unwillingly being 'put to' the shafts. Crocks showed a pair just being taken out of the shafts and being allowed to drink at the trough in the yard. The location of The Yard Gate is unknown but according to a review in Eye Witness of July 1911, by Desmond MacCarthy, recently secretary of the first Post-Impressionist exhibition, it completed the sequence by showing a horse being taken back to its stable (see F. Stenlake,
loc. cit.). The first version of Crocks was inexplicably
destroyed by the artist at some point after June 1914 when it had been exhibited at the Whitechapel Art Gallery's Twentieth Century Art exhibition; he did, however, paint another version of the same or similar composition in 1922; the present lot.

John Nash writing in the introduction to the 1926 Memorial exhibition catalogue commented, 'The work of the last few years before his death shows that he was still making full use of his increasing powers, as can be seen by several important paintings. It seems to me that in the picture of 'Crocks', his long experience and study of horses, combined with his consistently developing technique of painting, finds a true aesthetic expression. The structure is simple and admirably balanced, and the colour extremely beautiful'. A review in The Times of the 1926 Goupil Gallery exhibition echoed Nash's enthusiasm, 'Mr Bevan's pictures of horses such as The Cabhorse, The Parade at Aldridges and Crocks, are in a class by themselves in their combination of special knowledge with interest of design, and in all his work a contained affection for the subjects was expressed with great pictorial refinement'.

Crocks is one of Bevan's best-known images having been widely exhibited and illustrated. It was one of the eight works by the artist chosen for the 1944 C.E.M.A. exhibition of the Camden Town Group and one of six works by Bevan to be selected for the 1953 Arts Council Touring Exhibition. Its most recent showing in public was at the Painters of Camden Town exhibition at Christie's in 1988.

A crayon drawing of Crocks (11 x 13½ in.) dating from circa 1924 (The Paul Mellon Bequest, Yale Centre for British Art) is almost certainly the study drawing (which is a mirror image of the oil, the present lot) from which the lithographic stone for a subsequent print would have been made. The lithograph (see fig. 1) was produced in an edition of forty on cream wove paper, numbered on the lower left margin, and stamped with the monogram RPB, in the lower right margin. In addition, there are three proofs on white wove paper printed on both sides (see G. Dry, Robert Bevan 1865-1925 catalogue raisonné of the lithographs and other prints, London, 1968, no. 39).

We are grateful to Patrick Baty for his assistance with preparing the catalogue entries for lots 12 and 13.

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