Robert Bevan British, 1865-1925

Robert Bevan was a painter in oils and watercolours, and a printmaker of a wide variety of subjects including landscapes, figures and horse fairs. He studied at the Westminster School of Art under Fred Brown and then at Julian's in Paris. During the 1890s he worked in Pont-Aven, Brittany where he was acquainted with Gauguin. In 1897 he met the Polish artist Stanislawa de Karlowska and subsequently married her. An integral member of the Sickert circle, he was a founder-member of both the Camden Town Group and the London Group as well as exhibiting at the Allied Artists' Association and with the Fitzroy Street Group. His first one-man show was at the Baillie Gallery in 1905.

Although often modest in scale, his paintings and lithographs show a wonderful gift for pictorial design; his horse subjects, in particular, received much critical acclaim. Bevan painted in the Divisionist manner of Lucien Pissarro, whom he admired, but modified it in the direction of the pure colour and flat patterning of Gauguin. The critic Frank Rutter said of him: "he was one of the most essentially English painters of his time." In 2008 a major book about his life and work by Frances Stenlake, Robert Bevan from Gauguin to Camden Town, was published by Unicorn Press.