Robert Bevan

In 1908 Robert Bevan held a second solo exhibition at the Baillie Gallery in London, but it was barely mentioned in the press. That same year, however, brought a turning point in his career with his decision to exhibit at the inaugural exhibition at the Royal Albert Hall in July of the Allied Artists’ Association. This was an exhibiting society formed by the critic Frank Rutter on the model of the Paris Salon d’Automne which, unlike the Royal Academy, did not vet the works submitted. Instead, for a subscription, artists could simply exhibit a fixed number of works. Although the first, vast exhibition consisted of over 4,000 items, each artist’s pictures were shown as a group together. The five pictures Bevan submitted cannot now be identified. But they were admired by Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman, neither of whom had seen his work before, and they invited Bevan to join the Fitzroy Street Group. This was an important development for Bevan. For the first time since his days in Pont-Aven in Brittany, fourteen years earlier, he was part of a group of painters with shared interests. Perhaps more fundamentally, he was also given an opportunity to sell his work, and for it to be seen by important collectors and critics of contemporary British art.

Bevan was one of the older members of the group, and he seems to have quickly taken up a distinct position at Fitzroy Street. His friend Walter Bayes, another recruit from the Allied Artists’ Association exhibition, recalled that:

Bevan’s allowance from his parents allowed him to buy his friends’ work, effectively subsidising their own careers in a modest way, and formed the basis of the collection that was displayed in 2008 at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.2 His son estimated that: