Pure Colour | Robert Bevan at Harry Moore-Gwyn

In March 1905, an exhibition was held in the Baillie Gallery in Bayswater, London, of the work of Robert Bevan, who had studied in the Académie Julian in Paris alongside Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard and Paul Sérusier. Influenced by his French peers, and Paul Gauguin (who he had befriended in Pont-Aven in Brittany in 1891) he developed a vibrant, post-impressionist style, the first English artist to do so.

Robert Bevan, A Sussex Farm, c.1905, courtesy of Harry Moore-Gwyn

This was a full five years before Roger Fry’s famous Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition exposed such work to the London art world, and the London art world was not ready for it. One critic described Bevan’s use of colour as ‘violent’ and ‘garish’, suggesting it had ‘an evil habit of losing control of itself’. World Magazine called his work ‘French impressionism gone to the bad’. Black & White complained, of his painting The Courtyard: ‘it is difficult to be sure that the house-roof is not on fire, and whether trees are trees or leaping wisps of green flame’.

No matter. Bevan’s father was a rich banker, and he enjoyed the financial security to carry on regardless. In 1908 his participation in the inaugural Allied Artists Association exhibition caught the attention of Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore, and he was invited to join Walter Sickert’s Fitzroy Square Group; he subsequently became involved in the formation of the Camden Town Group, the London Group, and the Cumberland Market Group. Despite the support of his peers, and his winning round of several influential art critics of the day, he didn’t sell many paintings in his lifetime, and only one to a public institution. A memorial exhibition in 1926 at the London branch of the Goupil Gallery in Regent Street, was, however, well received, with the New Statesman art critic Philip Hendy (later director of the National Gallery) dubbing him ‘the first Englishman to use pure colour in the twentieth century’, and ‘the real pioneer of the English Modern School’.

After his death his son, Robert A Bevan, began a vigorous campaign to resurrect his father’s reputation, promoting and exhibiting his work, and writing a biography on the anniversary of his birth, in 1965. This paid off: nowadays Bevan is recognised to be a ModBrit pioneer, and he was featured in the Tate Britain’s 2008 retrospective of the Camden Group, as well as being given a retrospective in his own right at Southampton City Art Gallery later in the same year.

The above painting, A Sussex Farm was painted in c1905, probably in Kingston-near-Lewes, where Bevan spent the summer of that year in a cottage called St Ives. After his show at the Baillie Gallery, then: thankfully the harsh words of the critics didn’t put him off his bold experiments with broad brushstrokes of vivid colour. A Sussex Farm will be shown at British Art Fair by Harry Moore-Gwyn Fine Art.