Robert Bevan

R. A. Bevan, the Artist's son, from whom acquired by the present owner in 1970

London, The Mansard Gallery, The London Group, Sixteenth Exhibition, 8th May - 3rd June 1922, cat. no.6 (as Watering Oxen);
London, Goupil Galleries, The Memorial Exhibition of the Works by the Late Robert Bevan, February 1926, cat. no.154 (as Watering Oxen, Poland);
Brighton, Museum and Art Gallery, Robert Bevan Memorial Exhibition, August 1926, cat. no.15 (as Watering Oxen, Poland);
Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Robert Bevan, Centenary Exhibition, April - May 1965, cat. no.84;
London, Christie's, The Painters of Camden Town, January 1988, cat. no.200.

Robert Bevan, Robert Bevan - A Memoir by His Son, Studio Vista Limited, London, 1965, illustrated pl.81;
Terence Rodrigues (ed.), Treasures of the North, Exhibition Catalogue, London, 2000, p.112;
Frances Stenlake, Robert Bevan: From Gauguin to Camden Town, Unicorn Press, London, 2008, p.163, illustrated p.167.

Original canvas. The canvas undulates slightly in the upper and lower right corner and along the centre of the left edge. There is a minor fleck of paint loss to the wall above the figure on the left There are two small spots of staining between the figure's legs, with further minor surface dirt and flecks of surface matter to isolated areas of the canvas. This excepting the work appears in good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of retouching. Held in a gilt plaster frame. Please call the department on 0207 293 6424 if you have any questions about the present work.
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Watering Cattle, Poland reinforces what a stylish, modernist painter Robert Bevan was. From his early days, with perhaps the exception of Roderic O’Conor, Bevan was producing works quite alien to the British art establishment. He had encountered Gauguin while living and working at Pont-Aven in 1893-4, which inspired paintings that were remarkably advanced. A notable example is the The Courtyard from circa 1903-4 (sold in these rooms, 10^th March 2005, lot 4), which employed a radical palette seen by many commentators to have anticipated Fauvism by at least a year. It was painted in Poland, probably on his father-in-law’s estate, a connection which explains the setting of the present piece.

In 1891 Bevan had married a Polish art student Stanislawa de Karlowska, and was to thereafter enjoy spending summers working in southern Poland at Mydlow, near Opatow. Watering Cattle, Poland was painted from drawings made from his last trip there in 1921. Bevan’s son recalled that by this time, his father had also taken to making ‘small clay models of the animals, much as Degas made models of dancers and horses for his own pictures. I had never seen him make models of horses before, but I can remember cows of the same size – about 8 inches long – in the studio about 1917, and he told me that he had made a few models of horses for the same purpose in Brittany. These little figurines were roughly modelled, but most expressive. We begged him in vain to have them cast or baked into terracotta’ (see Robert Bevan, op. cit., p.23).

The present work has a companion piece, Watering Horses, Poland, similar in composition with the pump and the young man working it occupying the same foreground position in both pictures. They recall Bevan’s small but greatly revered, modernist stable and cab-yard scenes of London around 1911-14. In these, as Frances Stenlake points out, ‘attention is always paid to the caps of hats worn by all present; here, the horses handler’s cap and the barefoot boy’s hat are likewise essential details, forming part of the mauve and green colour scheme favoured throughout Bevan’s work.’ In Watering Cattle, Poland Bevan brings the figures and animals close to the picture plane, while still managing to draw the eye back to the figure with the horses in the background. It is such techniques, seen also in the use of outline and simplification of the background elements, which highlight the modernist principles of Bevan and which achieve such visually stimulating images.