Signed l.r.: Robert Bevan

Oil on canvas, 47 by 54.5 cm (18 ½ by 21 ins)

Provenance: the Estate of R.A.Bevan (the artist’s son)

Literature: Alice Strang, From Sickert to Gertler Modern British Art from Boxted House, p.64 (visible on the wall to the left of the fireplace in interior photograph of the Drawing Room at Boxted House)

Bevan spent two summers in 1905 and 1906 in a cottage called St Ives in the South Downs village of Kingston near Lewes in Sussex. It was a landscape that was extremely familiar to the young artist, his family estate being in nearby Horsgate. It also coincided with a slight shift in Bevan’s style towards a more divisionist technique of painting that assimilated the influence of the Impressionists and had been brought to England by Camille Pissarro’s son, Lucien. The distinctive farmhouse at the centre of this painting with its bright red-tiled roof appears in other works by Bevan from the period, for example in the painting A Small Southdown Farm now in the collection of Colchester and Ipswich Museums (no.R.1964-130). These Sussex paintings were some of the first mature works Bevan painted outside Poland, the home of his wife Stanislawa de Karlowska. Bevan was an artist whose style never stopped changing and developing, but some of the themes and motifs in this picture (including the figure and cart depicted on a steep country road) appear in the artist’s work for the rest of his working life. The majority of these Sussex paintings were shown at his exhibition at the Baillie Gallery in 1908. We are grateful to Patrick Baty for his assistance.