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Dimensions: 56 by 88cm., 22 by 27in.
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Provenance: The Artist's family, until at least 1951
Michael Peraticos, by 1965
Private Collection
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Exhibited: London, Baillie Gallery, Robert Bevan, 1905, no.53;
London, Allied Artists Association, 1911, no.1;
Southampton, City Art Gallery, The Camden Town Group, 1951, no. 7;
London, Arts Council, Robert Bevan 1865-1925, 1956, no.2, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, plate II;
London, Guildhall, Art Exhibitions Bureau, Trends in British Art, 1954;
London, P & D Colnaghi & Co. Ltd., Robert Bevan 1865-1925: Centenary Exhibition, 1965, no.8;
London, Royal Academy, Post Impressionism: Cross Currents in European Painting, 1979-80, no.278;
London, Christie's, The Painters of Camden Town 1905-1920, 1988, no.16, illustrated in colour in the exhibition catalogue.
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Literature: Glasgow Herald, 4 March 1905;
Black & White, 8 March 1905;
P.G. Konody, The Observer, 9 July 1911;
J.Wood Palmer, 'Robert Bevan', The Studio, January 1957, p.15;
R.A. Bevan, Robert Bevan: A Memoir by his Son, Studio Vista, London 1965, p.13, illustrated in colour, pl.17.
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Notes: In the summer of 1897, Bevan travelled to Jersey to the wedding of his friend and fellow artist, Eric Forbes Robertson. There he met Stanislawa de Karlowska, a Polish art-student and by December of that year they were married. His wife's family were gentlemen farmers of substance in Poland and Bevan and his wife visited their estate at Szeliwy a number of times. It is from these trips that much of Bevan's earliest successful work derives.
Although he had worked in Pont-Aven in 1893-4, and had thus been in contact with Gaugin, for the next few years he worked in almost total isolation, spending three years in a remote part of Exmoor, and later moving to Sussex. Painted in Poland, probably on his father-in-law's estate at Szeliwy, in 1903-4, The Courtyard is a remarkably advanced work and the outstanding painting of this period in his oeuvre. It has been seen by many commentators to have anticipated Fauvism by at least a year, and the contemporary reviews for its first showing in 1905 singled it out for violent abuse, presaging the wider response that would greet the exhibitions of Post-Impressionist and Fauve art later in the decade. These reactions clearly affected Bevan's confidence and he moved his painting away from this direction.
The strong colours and fluid paint-handling of The Courtyard were quite unlike anything else being produced by any British artist at the time, perhaps with the exception of Roderic O'Conor, and to the art establishment of 1905 it must have appeared to be at the very vanguard of the modern movement.
