By 1915, Robert Polhill Bevan (1865–1925) was treasurer of the London Group, successor to Walter Sickert’s Camden Town Group, and had formed his own group centred on his studio in Cumberland Market, Camden Town, London. The latter exhibited at the Goupil Gallery, London, and was later to be joined by Edward McKnight Kauffer and CRW Nevinson, who was to achieve fame as a War Artist.

Despite the landscapes he painted in the countryside of the Blackdown Hills in East Devon, Bevan’s more acclaimed paintings were mainly views in London, particularly those of Saint John’s Wood and Belsize Park.

Hay Carts, Cumberland Market from 1915 is another view of London’s last hay market, close to Bevan’s studio. The bales shown were made by mechanical baling machines and brought to London by barge.

The Green House, St John’s Wood from about 1918 shows one of many mansions that had been built in this former suburb of London, developed into low-density housing for the more affluent of the nineteenth century. This area is now known for being home to cricket with the major ground of Lord’s, and the Abbey Road Studios used by the Beatles and other famous bands. Bevan introduces a motor taxi opposite two horse-drawn carts, signalling the decline of the latter.

The Caller at the Mill from 1918-19 probably shows a scene in East Devon, painted during one of Bevan’s summer visits.

Also in typical Blackdown Hill country is The Ford, from the same period.

Bevan painted A Devon Cottage (Luppitt) in about 1920, in the same area to the north of Honiton.

In 1922, Bevan was elected a member of the New English Art Club.

He painted this view of Aldwych in central London in 1924. This is a crescent off the Strand, to the east of Charing Cross. At the left is a motor omnibus, while drinking at the water-trough beneath the memorial is one of the remaining working horses of London, which by now were well in decline.

Mount Stephen from 1924 shows one of the farms close to Luppitt in East Devon, presumably painted during one of Bevan’s summer visits.

I also have one undated watercolour of Bevan’s.

Landscape with Three Trees was most probably painted en plein air in the south-west of England, as an alternative to his early oil sketches.

Robert Bevan died of cancer of the stomach on 8 July 1925, in London. The following year his life and work were remembered in a retrospective, but he didn’t gain the recognition he deserved until his centenary in 1965, and remains seriously underrated even today.

References

Wikipedia.
Robert Upstone (ed) (2008), Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 85437 781 4.

On 8 July 1925, almost exactly a century ago, the British painter Robert Polhill Bevan died in London following surgery for stomach cancer. Although his paintings have been largely forgotten since, he was one of the active members of groups centred on Walter Sickert, including the Fitzroy Street and Camden Town Groups. He was perhaps the leading artist who recorded London’s final years of working horses. In this article and its sequel next week I summarise his career and show a selection of his paintings.

Robert Polhill Bevan was born in Hove, on the south coast of England near Brighton, and in 1888 started a short period as a student at the Westminster School of Art in London before he moved to Paris to study at the Académie Julian. Although it’s claimed that his fellow students there included Pierre Bonnard and several of those who were later to become Nabis, some of them were already at the École des Beaux-Arts, and it’s not clear whether Bevan ever came into contact with those artists in Paris. He did, though, visit the artists colony at Pont-Aven in Brittany in 1890 and more briefly in 1891.

In the autumn of 1891, Bevan travelled first to Madrid, where he studied the work of Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya, before going to Tangier. He returned to Brittany in 1893, where he was encouraged by Paul Gauguin and Auguste Renoir. He arrived back in Britain the following year, and moved to Exmoor, where he apparently painted and hunted, a pursuit that had occupied much of his time when he was in North Africa. He married the Polish artist Stanisława de Karłowska in late 1897, and in subsequent years often visited her family estates in central Poland.

During this early part of his career, he often sketched in oils en plein air. Morning over the Ploughed Fields is an example of these paintings from about 1904, and was almost certainly made during one of his visits to Poland. It’s small, with fluid brushstrokes of vivid colour. He divides the almost featureless plain into bands, with blue trees in the distance, and the far splash of a barn. Pinholes at its corners suggest that Bevan painted this on canvas when it was pinned to a board.

In 1905, Bevan had his first solo exhibition, which failed to attract critical attention. He then apparently experimented with a more Divisionist approach.

The Turn Rice-Plough, Sussex from about 1909 shows two ploughmen turning a plough in a field in the south-east of England. Its title is enigmatic: rice wasn’t grown there, and might be a simple error for turnwrest, a dialect name used in Kent and Sussex to describe any type of one-way plough needing to be turned at the end of a furrow as shown here.

Bevan exhibited five paintings in the first exhibition of the Allied Artists’ Association in London in 1908. His work was noticed by Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore, resulting in his being invited to join the Fitzroy Street Group. When Walter Sickert and his close circle were forming the Camden Town Group in 1911, Bevan was invited to be one of its sixteen members, and accepted.

He painted The Cab Horse in about 1910 using ‘anti-realist’ colours, and showed this at the first exhibition of the Camden Town Group. By this time, Bevan had a particular interest in the remaining working horses in London, including that shown here being harnessed to a hansom cab. The figure on the left is removing a blanket from the animal’s hindquarters, although their dress doesn’t suggest this is a cold day.

Bevan’s Horse Sale at the Barbican from 1912 follows Sickert’s advice to paint everyday scenes from life in London, and is a reminder that the city, here in Aldersgate, used to have bloodstock auctions.

The title of Bevan’s painting “Quiet with all Road Nuisances” from about 1912 quotes from the auctioneer’s description of this horse at another sale, and should have made this animal a good purchase for working in town.

After 1910, Bevan stopped visiting Poland in the summer. Instead he spent much of the season among the Blackdown Hills, on the border between Devon and Somerset, where he painted in the Bolham Valley and around the village of Luppitt, to the north of Honiton, Devon.

Like other members of the Camden Town Group, Bevan was a careful draftsman, and his oil paintings often started as sketches before being squared up and transferred to canvas. He drew this view of Swiss Cottage, Hampstead in 1912-13. The Swiss Cottage of the title refers to a part of Hampstead, now in the London Borough of Camden, named after a pub called the Swiss Tavern, now Ye Olde Swiss Cottage. This view shows a parade of shops rather than the pub, and has been carefully projected to a vanishing point off the paper to the far right.

Bevan painted Haze over the Valley in about 1913, when he was spending the summer at Applehayes, a farm in the Blackdown Hills owned by Harold Bertram Harrison (1855–1924), an amateur artist who had studied at the Slade School in London from 1896.

In 1913, Bevan had a further solo exhibition at the Carfax Gallery in London, which had hosted those of the Camden Town Group. When that group transformed into the London Group in 1913, Bevan was elected its treasurer.

During 1914-15, he rented a first-floor studio in Cumberland Market, Camden Town, which was then London’s specialist hay and straw market. Bevan’s studio was the centre for a small group consisting of himself, Gilman, Charles Ginner and John Nash, who became known as the Cumberland Market Group. They exhibited together at the Goupil Gallery in 1915.

The Weigh House, Cumberland Market from about 1914 shows this market in its last years, before it closed in the late 1920s. It was situated between Regent’s Park and Euston railway station, but was demolished during and after the Second World War to form a large housing estate.

References

Wikipedia.
Robert Upstone (ed) (2008), Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 85437 781 4.

Some of the performing arts across Europe had their roots not with the affluent upper classes, but as entertainment for the masses. These included the Commedia dell’Arte, and the British music hall that was popular in London and other towns and cities between 1850-1918. These were low-brow theatres that staged variety acts including popular songs, comedy, and anything that might appeal to ordinary working men and women. They originated after about 1830, from entertainment provided in pubs and inns, and like them, music halls also served food and drink.

Although Walter Sickert’s painting of Tipperary dates from 1914, it’s a good example of the origin of the music hall. It shows the artist’s model ‘Chicken’ sat at a pub piano playing the contemporary hit, It’s a Long Way to Tipperary. That had swept to popularity with British troops in 1914 as they went off to fight in the trenches on the other side of the Channel.

Before Sickert had taken up painting in 1881, he had tried pursuing a career as an actor, resulting in his lasting interest in performing arts and the music hall in particular. His early painting of Gatti’s Hungerford Palace of Varieties. Second Turn of Katie Lawrence from about 1888 shows the dimly lit interior of a music hall, as a young woman sings to an audience that appears unreceptive. Hungerford is a market town around sixty miles to the west of London, and appears to be an unlikely location for this music hall, which is more probably in the west of London.

Another young woman sings from the gloom in Sickert’s The Music Hall, or more cryptically The P.S. Wings in the O.P. Mirror, from 1888–89.

Among more than five hundred music halls around Britain at the time, Sickert made the Bedford in Camden Town, London, his favourite. The first there, known as the Old Bedford, opened in 1861 and was destroyed by fire in 1898. Its successor was the New Bedford, which was larger and even featured electric lighting. Among others who frequented the New Bedford was the novelist Virginia Woolf, and its performers included Charlie Chaplin before it finally closed in 1959.

His view of The Pit at the Old Bedford from 1889 shows the limited accommodation for musicians between the audience and stage.

Sickert sketched Vesta Victoria at the Old Bedford in about 1890.

His enthusiasm for music halls inspired others in the Camden Town Group to paint them as well, most notably Spencer Gore.

Gore soon developed a fascination for the theatre and music hall, and in 1906 started regular visits to the Alhambra Theatre of Varieties in Leicester Square, well-known at the time for spectacular ballets and acrobats. Like Degas and others in Paris, he sketched performances, then turned those into studio paintings. This sketch of The Alhambra Theatre, “On the Sands” was made in 1910, using black chalk and graphite, and appears more compositional in purpose. The artist has squared it up ready to transfer to canvas.

Ballet Scene from “On the Sands” (1910) is Gore’s finished painting. He has amended the foreground structure at the lower left, representing the front of the box or gallery he was seated in, but most of the other details appear faithful to his sketch. He has divided much of his canvas between the ballet on the stage at the upper left, and the musicians in the orchestra pit in the lower right.

Gore’s painting of the musical double act of Inez and Taki (1910) is another of his views from inside the Alhambra Theatre of Varieties. They’re playing antiquated lyre guitars, an odd choice of instrument.

Later in his career, Sickert returned to his enduring theme of music halls in The New Bedford, painted in about 1914-15, capturing the splendour of the interior at its height.

After the First World War, music halls were replaced as public tastes changed, and licensing laws prevented them from serving alcohol. The great majority were closed by the 1960s, when television was taking over as the most popular means of entertainment.

我每天走路上班的路上有几棵樱花。前几天开花（见“小镇四月初的樱花”），现在已经盛放。有意思的是原来粉红的花骨朵 […]