Robert Bevan

Judge William Evans, before 1918
The Leicester Galleries, London, where acquired by Wilfrid A. Evill 17th February 1930 for £21.0.0, by whom bequeathed to Honor Frost in 1963

London, Goupil Gallery, A Collection of Oil Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings formed by the late William Evans, May - June 1918, cat. no.59;
London, Leicester Galleries, Camden Town Group Exhibition, January 1930, cat. no.37 (probably);
London, The Home of Wilfrid A. Evill, Contemporary Art Society, Catalogue of Part of a Collection of Oil Paintings, Water Colours, Drawings and Sculpture Belonging to W. A. Evill, Esq., December 1947 - February 1948, cat. no.19 (as Sunrise in Cab Yard);
London, The Home of Wilfrid A. Evill, Contemporary Art Society, Pictures, Drawings, Water Colours and Sculpture, April - May 1961, (part II- section 1) cat. no.12 (as Coach Yard); 
Brighton, Brighton Art Gallery, The Wilfrid Evill Memorial Exhibition, June - August 1965, cat. no.10 (as Sunrise in the Cabyard).

Colour Magazine, July 1918, illustrated, as The Hansom;
R.A. Bevan, Robert Bevan: A Memoir by his Son, Studio Vista, London 1965, note to pl.28.

The colours are much brighter, fresher and more vivid than they appear in the catalogue illustration. Please view the work in our ecatalogue online for an updated illustration. Original canvas. There is a small sensitive V-shaped repair to the centre of the canvas, approximatley 2cm. in length. There is some minor craquelure which corresponds with the upper stretcher bar, and a few other small isolated spots in the upper half of the picture, notably a small area to the right of the cab roof, which are only visible upon close inspection. There is an old pin hole along the left of the upper edge, and another to the centre of the right edge. The surface has recently been cleaned and is in otherwise good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals a small spot of retouching to the cab, which corresponds to the aforementioned repair, a tiny area above the pots on the left. Held in a gilt plaster frame with a canvas inset. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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The extent to which Bevan's choice of the cab-yards and stables of London has become a subject with which he has become so strongly identified is, considering their relatively small number, perhaps testament to the appeal that these paintings have, both as examples of modern painting and as evocations of a past age of the city.

Cabyard, Early Morning is one of very few of such paintings to remain in private hands, and it demonstrates the very advanced and almost pointiliste technique that Bevan had developed during the early years of the century, very much in advance of the mainstream of British painting, and employing a use of light and colour that would have been somewhat startling to most observers.

As such, and as a painting that has been largely unseen for at least half a century, Cabyard, Early Morning may be one of the most important of Bevan's works to re-emerge for many years. A preliminary drawing is published in R.A.Bevan's memoir of his father, entitled there as Washing the Cab and dated to c.1908 (R.A.Bevan, Robert Bevan: A Memoir by his Son, Studio Vista, London 1965, pl.28), and gives the whereabouts of the painting as having formerly been in the collection of Judge Evans. A significant collector of contemporary British art in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Evans died in 1918 and his collection was dispersed through a selling exhibition that same year at the Goupil Gallery.

As sometimes happens, a small change in the titling of a piece (it was exhibited in 1918 as Cabyard, Early Morning and sold to Evill as such in 1930) becomes magnified over the years, and the present work, which is indeed that same painting formerly owned by Judge Evans, has thus been very intermittently seen and exhibited under various erroneous titles for almost a century, causing it to be missed by Bevan scholars. Stylistically and compositionally very closely related to one of Bevan's most celebrated works, Cabyard at Night (Brighton City Art Gallery) of c.1910 (the only example of Bevan's work to be acquired by a British public collection during the artist's lifetime), it is nevertheless possibly even earlier in execution, and must therefore be one of the earliest examples of Bevan's treatment of the subject.

The level of observation in the subject is combined with an extremely well-honed understanding of the effect of light and shade in Cabyard, Early Morning, be that in the way in which the movement of the groom attending to the horse, perhaps checking the harness or tightening girths, suggests the placement of the animal which is almost entirely obscured from our view by the bulk of the vehicle, or the intimation of a brisk morning in the pose of the cab driver in his long coat as he chats with the other stable-hand. The space outside the door is flooded with bright morning sun which gleams on the flanks of a horse being led away, just the slightest part of which we see as it has almost already passed from our sight, adding to our sense of space and movement in the yard beyond. With the smallest but deftest of touches, Bevan crowns the effect of the sun by a tiny speck of red paint, indicating where the sun glows through the red glass of the cab lantern.

We are grateful to Patrick Baty and Frances Stenlake for their kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.