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Artist or Maker: Robert Polhill Bevan (1865-1925)

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Description: The Farm Gate, Mydlow
oil on canvas
23 3/4 x 19 1/4 in. (60.4 x 48.8 cm.)
Painted circa 1908-09.

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Provenance: R.A. Bevan, the artist's son.
with Maltzahn Gallery, London.

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Exhibited: Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Robert Bevan Centenary Exhibition, April - May 1965, no. 73.

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Notes: As with a number of subjects the artist painted before circa 1908, Bevan painted two versions of this composition. In this case, the other picture, The Yard Gate, Mydlow, Poland, is in the collection of Ulster Museum, Belfast and exhibits a specifically divisionist technique. At least two other compositions were painted twice, once in a divisionist technique and one with broader brushstrokes for example The Well at Mydlow and The Smith at Szeliwy.

After 1907, Bevan, besides staying with his other Polish in-laws, visited his brother-in-law, Stanislawa Rytel, at Mydlow near Opatow Kielecki in southern Poland. He experimented with a divisionist technique of painting having seen the work of Seurat, Signac, Toulouse Lautrec and Van Gogh in September 1889 at the fifth Salon des Indépendents whilst studying at the Academie Julian in Paris from September 1889 to July 1890. He experimented with several styles before settling down to a more consistent form of post-impressionism from about 1908. A Painting entitled the 'Yard Gate' was exhibited at the Goupil Gallery, 1st Camden Town Group Exhibition, June 1911, no. 31. (see F. Farmer, Exhibition catalogue, The Painters of Camden Town 1905-1920, London, Christie's, January 1988, p. 52).

We are very grateful to Patrick Baty for his assistance in preparing the catalogue entry for this lot.

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