Robert Bevan

Robert Bevan

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  Robert Bevan 1865–1925

Robert Polhill Bevan was the fourth child in a family of six born to Richard Bevan, banker in the firm of Barclay, Bevan, Tritton and Co. (now known simply as Barclays) and Laura Bevan (née Polhill). He resisted following his elder brothers into a career in the bank and having received drawing lessons at home with the artist Arthur Earnest Pearce (1859–1934), who later became a designer for Doulton’s potteries, he studied art at the Westminster School of Art under the principalship of Frederick Brown (1851–1941), founder member of the New English Art Club and later to become Professor of the Slade School of Fine Art. Although his upbringing was quintessentially English, Bevan formed important links with the continental avant-garde from early on in his artistic career. In the autumn of 1889, he undertook a year’s study at the Académie Julian, one of many Parisian establishments that catered for art students from all over Europe. It was in Paris that Bevan was introduced to recent developments in French painting including the work of the ‘Pont-Aven School’, a colony of artists working in Brittany with Paul Gauguin. From the summer of 1890 until the autumn of 1891 Bevan visited Pont-Aven himself. His sketchbooks from this period are now in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

He was repeatedly drawn back to the Blackdown Hills on the borders of Devon and Cornwall where he produced work that was freer and simpler than in earlier years. In 1923, he bought a cottage called Marlpit on Luppitt Common and it was during time spent working at Marlpit in May 1925 that Bevan fell ill. He died after an operation in London on 8 July 1925.