The Camden Town Group in Context

Inherited by Stanislawa de Karlowska (1876–1952), the artist’s widow; purchased through the Goupil Gallery, London, by the Duveen Paintings Fund 1926, by whom presented to Tate Gallery 1949.

The Cab Horse is painted in artists’ oil colours on a primed and stretched canvas. The cloth is one piece of open, plain weave, coarse fibre canvas, possibly jute. The canvas warp is horizontal to the image and the top edge has distortions and holes from the hooks used to attach the canvas onto a loom for priming. The priming appears to consist of an animal glue sizing with an off-white layer of oil priming that covers most of the canvas with an even and thin layer retaining the weave texture. The Bevan studio stamp has been applied to the back of the canvas and the stretcher (see also Tate T01121).

The painting covers the whole face of the stretched canvas. The canvas was prepared for transferring the image from a drawing by forming a grid of thin threads over the front held by pins around the edges. The pin holes are approximately 3 inches apart on the vertical edge and more than 3½ inches apart along the horizontal edge forming a 7 x 7 inch grid. The grid appears to have remained in place during painting, leaving occasional characteristic ridges in the paint.

The initial drawing was applied fluently in thinned blue oil paint. Spencer Gore used the same technique for underdrawing, which was probably influenced by post-impressionist practice (see Tate T02260). The main colour was applied in rapid brushstrokes of fluid colour dabbed, scumbled and dragged on. The white priming is often visible through the broken colour, particularly in the depiction of the pale surfaces of the road and buildings. The lively texture and broken colour gives the sensation of the play of diffuse light on static and moving surfaces. Where the colour has been more extensively worked, for example in the horse, in the modification of the cab lamp and the surrounding wall towards the top left, the paint is overlaid in fluent strokes of contrasting cool and warm colours, which maintain the vibrancy of the surface. In some areas thicker applications of the fluid paint has developed fine contraction cracks on drying.

A warm yellow varnish covers most but not the entire surface. It has gathered into small pools in the intricate texture of the paint surface and was probably applied soon after the paint dried to enrich the sunken surface of the paint. There are some sizeable areas where the surface is unvarnished, which appear to be random (see also Tate N04750).

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:

Marjorie Lilly gave a flavour of Bevan’s personality at Fitzroy Street, recalling that:

It was probably in the same year he joined the Fitzroy Street Group that Bevan painted The Hansom Cab,5 the first of what was to become a series of pictures depicting cab-yards and their horses. Bevan’s son believed the decision to take up these subjects may have been ‘The only influence which I think Sickert exerted ... by encouraging him to paint what really interested him in what he saw around him in London’.6 This was fairly standard realist advice. A keen rider and equine connoisseur, what always interested Bevan more than anything else was horses. It should be no surprise then that he sought out urban, working life equestrian subjects for his art, and in truth Sickert may have had little to do with his decision to do so. Although the great majority were painted around 1910, between 1908 and 1912 Bevan painted a series of cab-horse subjects, numbering ‘at least eight’ according to his son.7 These include Crocks c.1909–10 (destroyed by the artist),8 The Cabyard, Night 1910 (fig.1), The Cab Yard, Evening c.1910 (private collection),9 Thirsty Cab Horse c.1910 (private collection),10 No.12612 exhibited 1911 (untraced),11 The Yard Gate exhibited 1911 (untraced),12 and The Clipped Horse 1911 (private collection).13 Cab subjects were clearly of importance to Bevan for it was the way he represented himself principally in the very first Camden Town Group exhibition, in which he showed Crocks, Tate’s The Cab Horse and The Yard Gate, along with a landscape, In Sussex c.1911 (private collection).14 Bevan showed the cab-yard at different times of day in his sequence of pictures, and under different lighting conditions.

In The Cab Horse, Bevan shows a horse being released from the shafts of a two-wheeled hansom-cab, and simultaneously having a blanket thrown over its back, signifying it has returned from the day’s work. It is a scene full of movement: the horse staggering back awkwardly as the men manoeuvre it into position. The grinning face, prominent nose and lips, and ruddy colouring of the man on the right deliver an element of caricature, having something of the quality of the knockabout Georgian humour, bulging bodies and dynamic, bounding draughtsmanship of Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827). But at the same time the man holding the bridle is also reminiscent of more elegant eighteenth-century horse and groom pictures by equestrian painters such as George Stubbs (1724–1806), for example A Grey Hunter with a Groom and a Greyhound at Creswell Crags c.1762–4 (Tate N01452, fig.2). Indeed, Bevan’s son confirms that his father ‘was a great admirer of such artists as Hogarth, Stubbs, and Rowlandson’.15 The playful dogs on the right margin add a foil or commentary to the horse’s friskiness, or the activity of the men themselves, and this also is a rhetorical device to be found in historic British painting. Bevan’s picture, however, is emphatically a scene from working-class life, and a commemoration of a working horse rather than a sleek thoroughbred. He had a lifelong love of horses, and as a young man had hunted on Exmoor and raced horses while living in Tangiers. ‘Contemporaries of his youth told us that he was a good and bold horseman’, his son wrote. ‘And though he could not afford to hunt after his marriage, and very seldom rode in England, he continued to study horses not only as types but often as individuals with love and understanding.’16

Bevan made studies for the painting at the cab-yard in Ormonde Terrace, London NW8, overlooking Primrose Hill, and just a few minutes’ walk from his house in Adamson Road, Swiss Cottage. Any trace of the cab-yard has since been obliterated by a large block of flats, probably built between the two world wars. There is an extended sequence of sketches and designs for alternative compositions at the yard in an unfoliated sketchbook in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.17 This contains numerous drawings of details of cabs, cab lamps, horses and drivers, measurements of cabs and wheels, a composition study for a view out of the Ormonde Terrace yard gates and up the road, and another of an unhitched horse and group of men lounging by the gates viewed from the same standpoint as The Cab Horse. There are not, however, in any of Bevan’s surviving sketchbooks in the Ashmolean, sketches or composition designs which directly relate to the Tate picture. The sketchbook composition studies all have a line border, indicating that Bevan considered them suitable to work up into finished pictures. Together they indicate that Bevan recorded successive stages of the cab-yard’s work, from hitching to unhitching, feeding and watering and preparation for the horse’s sleep in the stable.

The cabman himself then held a distinct personality in the popular imagination, somewhat akin today to our concept of a stereotypical London taxi driver (fig.3). Throughout the Victorian and Edwardian period the cabman was characterised as being rude, as likely to try to cheat on the fare, and often for being drunk. It was a characterisation that Joseph Conrad addressed in an extended passage in his novel The Secret Agent written in 1907. Castigated for treating his horse too harshly, a one-handed cabman explains in his defence that he is forced to work long hours to support his large family, and observes that ‘This ain’t an easy world ... ‘Ard on osses, but dam’ sight ’arder on chaps like me’.18 The type of behaviour expected from cab-drivers was confirmed by figures for their prosecution: ‘Out of the 15,000 cabmen, about 2,000 are convicted every year for drunkenness, cruelty, wilful misbehaviour, loitering, plying, obstruction, stopping on the wrong side of the road, delaying, leaving their cabs unattended’.19

Bevan was painting his cab-horse pictures at a time of rapid transition, when the traditional cabs were being replaced by motor taxis. The horse cab trade was a big employer; the 1891 census listed 15,219 licensed London cab-drivers, and they were a more numerous group than, for instance, dock workers. There were also numerous attendant professions to the cab-drivers based in the yards themselves, such as coachbuilders and stablemen.20 The first motor cab was licensed in London in 1903, and it was the only one operating in the city that year, while there were 11,404 registered horse-drawn cabs. But over the next seven years there was a dramatic and very visible change. Bevan first showed The Cab Horse in the year that motor taxis overtook horse cabs in number. In 1909 there were 3,956 motor cabs and 6,562 horse cabs licensed and listed in the Annual Report of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police; but in 1910 the motors became the more numerous, with 6,397 licensed against 4,724 horse cabs. This trend continued and by 1914 there were only 1,400 horse cabs; by 1923 there were 347 and in 1930 just 69, and these for the most part used for giving sight-seeing rides to tourists or for weddings.21 The look and experience of London’s streets changed irrevocably and quickly. This decline of a traditional trade caused some degree of hardship in the cab-horse business. Horse cabmen were given preferential treatment in obtaining licences to drive the new motor taxis in that they were excused being tested on their ‘knowledge’ of the streets and were simply given a driving test. In 1911 it was estimated that sixty-seven per cent of motor taxi drivers were former horse cabmen. However, others did not find replacement employment in the new trade, and older horse drivers were less likely to find a job driving motors because the cost of insuring them made their employment by the cab companies too expensive. Such was the problem that in 1910 the horse cab

drivers’ union protested that many such men were ending up in the workhouse.22 Principally as a response to the enforced retirement of the horses, but also an organisation to find work for their drivers, a Horses’ and Drivers’ Aid Committee was formed in 1912.

Bevan was evidently aware of the tribulations of the industry and the drivers. On Christmas Day 1911 he received a letter from John Lyon, Forage Contractor, of 31 Queen’s Terrace, St John’s Wood, one of the cab-yards where he had been making pictures, thanking him for what must have been a donation:

The economics of the cab trade were explained in considerable detail in W.J. Gordon’s The Horse World of London and, although this was published in 1896, the same conditions still applied when Bevan painted The Cab Horse. Gordon explained that the horse cab trade operated on a system of rental:

Under the subheading ‘The Vanishing Cab Horse’, Frank Rutter drew attention to the contemporary resonance and social importance of Bevan’s cab pictures when they were shown in the first Camden Town Group exhibition in 1911:

Rutter had already praised Bevan’s pictures of this sort. When The Cab Horse was shown for the first time in 1910 he had singled it out in his Sunday Times review of the New English Art Club exhibition:

The picture’s colouring was something on which almost all critical notices of The Cab Horse focused their attention. Bevan’s colour scheme was extremely adventurous, using combinations of both complementary and contrasting colours, such as red with green. His choice and use of colours is reminiscent of pictures by the Fauve painters, and may be compared most closely with those of André Derain (1880–1954). Such works were virtually unseen in London before Roger Fry’s two post-impressionist exhibitions held in 1910 and 1912. But Bevan evidently kept up with artistic developments in Paris, his son writing that:

In the first decade of the century, his son noted, Bevan ‘visited Paris from time to time and kept himself informed of what was going on across the Channel in these explosive years’.28 Postcards in the possession of Bevan’s descendants indicate that he travelled to Paris, and is likely therefore to have witnessed the progressive evolution of modern French painting, and the revolution in colouring. Bevan’s bold colour scheme, and his outlining of the forms in The Cab Horse, was probably a conscious response to recent French painting. The dabbed touches of colour are a development of the impressionist technique he had used in earlier pictures. The paint surface itself, whilst quite thin overall, has a series of ridges which suggest that it was painted using a string grid attached over the canvas. This would have been used to copy the design from a squared-up drawing on to the canvas.

The critic Desmond MacCarthy, writing in Eye-Witness, analysed whether Bevan’s colour scheme in The Cab Horse affected the essential truthfulness of the subject. ‘Among the most interesting’ items in the 1911 Camden Town exhibition, he wrote,

Reviewing the same show, the Morning Post decided that Bevan’s Cab Horse and The Yard Gate were

Reactions to Bevan’s pictures in the group’s first exhibition were mixed. While The Bazaar, the Exchange and Mart observed that ‘Truly clever and impressionistic are the cab-yard scenes by Mr. R.P. Bevan’,31 the Daily Graphic sardonically noted ‘It cannot be said there is anything among the exhibits which calls for a lyrical expression of delight, unless such might be inspired by a company of ballet dancers, cab horses, and murderers, to which Mr. Gore, Mr. Bevan and Mr. Sickert introduce us’.32 The Morning Leader, under the heading ‘Art Anarchists’, felt it necessary to warn visitors:

Huntly Carter in the New Age had identified what he perceived as a small group of ‘colourists’ within the 1910 New English Art Club exhibition at which The Cab Horse was shown. After postulating that ‘colour has the rare merit of changing men’s atmosphere’, he observed that while colour had the potential to enervate it could also be a source of disturbance, and that ‘three fourths of the human race are unaffected by colour, except in a hostile form. Pure, clean colour arouses in their honest bosoms an exasperation only equalled by that called forth by the so-called indecent forms of art.’34 Turning to the New English Art Club exhibition, Carter continued:

When Bevan showed The Cab Horse at the 1910 winter exhibition of the New English Art Club, he and the other Fitzroy Street artists were getting increasingly irritated with the club’s selectors, and two of Bevan’s watercolours were turned down for the show. Spencer Gore wrote about the exhibition to his pupil John Doman Turner:

This dissatisfaction with the New English Art Club would be one of the factors that precipitated the founding of the Camden Town Group in 1911. In his next letter to Doman Turner, Gore wrote baldly:

Following Bevan’s death a memorial exhibition was held at the Goupil Gallery in 1926 and The Cab Horse was bought there by the Duveen Fund for £60 (fig.4). The first work it had acquired, it was not assigned to the Tate Gallery until 1949.