Robert Polhill Bevan was born in Hove, Sussex in 1865 and grew up in Horsgate, near Cuckfield.
He studied at Westminster School of Art, London and at the Académie Julian in Paris. His training during the 1890s also included two periods in Pont-Aven in Brittany – where he met Paul Gauguin – as well as time spent in Madrid and Tangier.
In 1897, Bevan met and married the Polish artist Stanislawa de Karlowska (1876-1952). Three years later they moved to 14 Adamson Road, London, which remained their base for the rest of Bevan’s life. The couple became key figures in London’s art world before and after World War One and held popular ‘at homes’ on Sunday afternoons during the 1910s.
As Alice Strang has explained:
‘Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore…saw Bevan’s work for the first time at the Allied Artists Association exhibition of 1908. As a result, they invited him to join Walter Sickert’s Fitzroy Street Group and Bevan was ushered into the heart of a loose association of pioneering artists.’
As a founder member of the Camden Town Group (1911-13), London Group (from 1913) and the Cumberland Market Group (1914-19), Bevan deepened his association with these artists and others, such as Walter Bayes, Malcolm Drummond, Charles Ginner and William Ratcliffe, putting him at the forefront of English art of the period.
During the late 1910s and early 1920s Bevan developed a striking graphic style which was shown to best effect in his lithographs. Having abandoned the medium in 1901, he returned to it in 1918 with aplomb. He was a keen countryman and spent a significant amount of time from 1912 until his death working on the Devon-Somerset borders, particularly in Applehayes, the Bolham valley and Luppitt.
Bevan was a highly-skilled horseman and his images of horses, whether depicted in hunting or farming scenes, or in cab yards and at horse sales, are amongst the most celebrated of his oeuvre. He would sketch during the sales at the Barbican, Aldridge’s, Ward’s Repository and Tattersall’s, working up his notes and drawings into paintings and prints once back in his studio. He enjoyed the interaction between people and animals as much as the pace and spectacle of the event, as can be seen in several of his lithographs.
Following Bevan’s death in 1925, memorial exhibitions were held at the Goupil Gallery in London and at Brighton Art Gallery. Bevan’s works are held in many major public collections, with particularly significant holdings in the British Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, Yale Center for British Art and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
As the artist’s son wrote:
‘I doubt whether Bevan earned as much as £4,000 in the whole of his working life. But he was, at all times a whole-hearted professional artist of great determination, painting, as Frederic Gore…[wrote]…in 1965, ‘with the quiet assurance of a man who is certain of immortality’.