1865-1925
Return to the Village, c.1901-3
Ref: 2196
Signed l.r.: Robert Bevan
oil on canvas, 64.5 by 81.5cm
Provenance: Sir Siegmund and Lady Eva Warburg, by 1961, and thence by descent to the present owner
Literature: R.A.Bevan, Robert Bevan, A Memoir by His Son, Studio Vista, London, illustrated no. 16
Exhibited: London, Colnaghi Gallery, Paintings of Robert Bevan, 1961 (as Return to the Village, Poland)
Few British artists were painting with such radical and modern use of colour at this early stage of the twentieth century. Some sixty years later, Sir Philip Hendy, then Director of the National Gallery, in his preface to the 1961 Bevan retrospective exhibition at Colnaghi’s, commented that Bevan was perhaps the first Englishman to use pure colour in the twentieth Century.