Robert Bevan 1865-1925
Burford Farm, Devon, 1918
oil on canvas
24½ x 29 ins
signed lower right 'Robert Bevan'

Provenance
Anthony D'Offay Gallery, London
Private Collection

Exhibited
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York



Though best known for his London scenes in which the streets and horse-markets in and around Fitzroy Square and the Cumberland Market became very much his particular artistic territory, Robert Bevan also painted a whole series of handsome landscapes of the Devon countryside. These date from the last 10-15 years of his life when, along with fellow Camden Town painters Ginner and Spencer Gore, Bevan was invited to spend painting holidays at the Devon farmhouse (Applehayes near Clayhidon in the Blackdown Hills) of Harold B.Harrison, a retired Argentinian cattle-rancher who in his old age had become a student at the Slade School of Art. When wartime conditions made these holidays difficult to continue Bevan, in 1916, rented a cottage in the Bolham Valley, in an even remoter part of the Blackdown Hills. It was an area in which, as this painting reveals, Bevan evidently felt very much at home with; the complexity of the hilly landscape is reduced to a powerful geometric simplicity that reflects the influence of Roger Fry’s Post Impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912. Bevan himself was reportedly extremely pleased when the village postman said of one of these landscapes 'That field is laid out beautiful!'.