London is the capital and largest city of both England and the United Kingdom. Standing on the River Thames in the south-east of England, at the head of its 50-mile (80 km) estuary leading to the North Sea, London has been a major settlement for two millennia. Londinium was founded by the Romans. The City of London, London's ancient core − an area of just 1.12 square miles (2.9 km2) and colloquially known as the Square Mile − retains boundaries that follow closely its medieval limits. The City of Westminster is also an Inner London borough holding city status. Greater London is governed by the Mayor of London and the London Assembly.
Robert Polhill Bevan was a British painter, draughtsman and lithographer. He was a founding member of the Camden Town Group, the London Group, and the Cumberland Market Group.
Cumberland Market was a London market between Regent's Park and Euston railway station. It was built in the early 19th century and was London's hay and straw market for a hundred years until the late 1920s. An arm of the Regent's Canal was built to the market. The market was surrounded by modest housing, and in the early 20th century became an artistic community. The original houses were demolished during and after the Second World War and it is now a housing estate, known as Regent's Park Estate.
Robert Bevan took the rooms on the first floor of 49 Cumberland Market, north of Regent's Park, in April 1914, after the break-up of the Camden Town Group and the formation of its successor, the London Group. He had been a founder member of both organizations.[3] He held meetings there with his friends, and these became a formalised group towards the end of the year, founded by him with fellow Camden Town Group members, Charles Ginner and Harold Gilman, who began to work with the style called Neo-Realism.[2]
Regent's Park is one of the Royal Parks of London. It lies within north-west London, partly in the City of Westminster and partly in the London Borough of Camden. It contains Regent's University London and the London Zoo.
The Camden Town Group was a group of English Post-Impressionist artists active 1911–1913. They gathered frequently at the studio of painter Walter Sickert in the Camden Town area of London.
Charles Isaac Ginner (1878–1952) was a British painter of landscape and urban subjects. Born in the south of France at Cannes, of British parents, in 1910 he settled in London, where he was an associate of Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman and a key member of the Camden Town Group.
They defined what they did as exploring the shapes and colours of daily life (in particular those of north-west London), while also paying attention to their proper disposition compositionally and maintaining sensitivity to the medium of paint itself as key to an expressive image; the strong emphasis on natural observation was a differentiation from the Camden Town Group.[2][4] These principles were announced in a manifesto by Ginner published in New Age on 1 January 1914, and also employed as the preface to a joint show that year by Gilman and Ginner. It spoke against the "decorative" features of Post-Impressionist followers, as well as attacking academic art.[2]
Post-Impressionism is a predominantly French art movement that developed roughly between 1886 and 1905, from the last Impressionist exhibition to the birth of Fauvism. Post-Impressionism emerged as a reaction against Impressionists' concern for the naturalistic depiction of light and colour. Due to its broad emphasis on abstract qualities or symbolic content, Post-Impressionism encompasses Les Nabis Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, Cloisonnism, Pont-Aven School, and Synthetism, along with some later Impressionists' work. The movement was led by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat.
In 1915 they were joined by John Nash.[2] In April of that year the only exhibition of the Cumberland Market Group was held in the Goupil Gallery. The group was subsequently enlarged by the addition of the American artist Edward McKnight Kauffer[5] and by Christopher Nevinson, but it held no further formal exhibitions. From 1916 to 1917 a School of Painting was run in Soho, based on the group's artistic philosophy.[2] Goupil’s continued to be of help by allowing the group's Saturday afternoon "At Homes" to be moved to their Grey Room.[6] Although not officially dissolved, the group lapsed after Gilman's death in 1919.[2]
John Northcote Nash was a British painter of landscapes and still-lives, and a wood engraver and illustrator, particularly of botanic works. He was the younger brother of the artist Paul Nash.
Goupil & Cie was a leading art dealership in 19th-century France, with headquarters in Paris. Step by step, Goupil established a worldwide trade in fine art reproductions of paintings and sculptures, with a network of branches and agents in London, Brussels, The Hague, Berlin and Vienna, as well as in New York City and Australia. Instrumental for this expansion were the Ateliers Photographiques, a plant north of Paris, in Asnières, which took up work in 1869. The leading figure was Adolphe Goupil (1806–1893). His daughter Marie married the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme.
Edward McKnight Kauffer was an American artist and graphic designer who lived for much of his life in the United Kingdom. He worked mainly in poster art, but was also active as a painter, book illustrator and theatre designer.
Harold John Wilde Gilman was a British painter of interiors, portraits and landscapes, and a founder-member of the Camden Town Group.
Edward Alexander Wadsworth was an English artist, most famous for his close association with Vorticism. He painted, often in tempera, coastal views, abstracts, portraits and still-life. He was also an engraver on wood and copper. In the First World War he was involved in transferring dazzle camouflage designs onto ships for the Royal Navy, and after the war he continued to paint nautical themes.
William Patrick Roberts was a British artist.
Legacy
A Countryman in Town: Robert Bevan and the Cumberland Market Group was held at Southampton City Art Gallery, 26 September – 14 December 2008. It moved to Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, 13 January – 21 March 2009. [7]
The Southampton City Art Gallery is an art gallery in Southampton, southern England. It is located in the Civic Centre on Commercial boulevard.
Abbot Hall Art Gallery is a museum and gallery in Kendal, England. Abbot Hall was built in 1759 by Colonel George Wilson, the second son of Daniel Wilson of Dallam Tower, a large house and country estate nearby. It was built on the site of the old Abbot’s Hall, roughly where the museum is today. Before the Dissolution of the Monasteries this was where the Abbot or his representative would stay when visiting from the mother house of St Mary's Abbey, York. The architect is unknown. During the early twentieth century the Grade I listed building was dilapidated and has been restored as an art gallery.
Notes and references
↑ Perfect Moderns: A History of the Camden Town Group.By Wendy Baron. Published by Ashgate, 2000. Page 154.
↑ Robins, Anna Gruetzner. Modern Art in Britain, 1910-1914, Merrell Holberton in association with Barbican Art Gallery, 1997.
↑ Handbook of Modern British Painting, 1900-1980: 1900-1980. By Alan Windsor. Published by Scolar Press, 1992. ISBN0-85967-823-7
↑ Still Life: The Object in American Art, 1915-1995: Selections from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), Lowery Stokes Sims, Sabine Rewald, William Slattery Lieberman, American Federation of Arts, American Federation of Arts. Published by Rizzoli, 1996.
↑ The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Art. By Harold Osborne. Published by Oxford University Press, 1981 ISBN0-19-866119-3, pages 328 - 330
↑ The catalogue of the same name contains useful essays on Robert Bevan, by Frances Stenlake; on the Cumberland Market Group, by John Yeates and on Cumberland Market itself, by Patrick Baty (Bevan’s great-grandson).
Bibliography
Robert Bevan, Robert Bevan: A Memoir by his Son. London, Studio Vista. 1965.
Frances Stenlake, Robert Bevan from Gauguin to Camden Town. London, Unicorn Press. 2008.
John Yeates, NW1. The Camden Town Artists. A social history. Somerset, Heale Gallery. 2007.
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