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Friday 9 January 2009

Intimate moments

From Sickert to Gertler: Modern British Art from Boxted House
Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, Suffolk, until 13 December

Private collections of art are fascinating, both for the light they shed on the tastes and preoccupations of their owners, and for the otherwise often hidden network of associations they can reveal. Paintings and sculptures made on a domestic scale exert a subtly different appeal than the products of public or museum art. The intimacy of the home setting often awakens a resonance in the art which the de-personalised aura of a gallery can stifle or deny. However, few collections, apart from the grandest, are maintained in the houses for which they were assembled, and if they are left to museums are inevitably broken up and lose their identity. In Modern British Art from Boxted House, we are fortunate to see an intensely personal collection kept together and presented in the intimate milieu of Gainsborough’s House. The result is highly effective.

Boxted House, just north of Sudbury in Suffolk, was the home of Natalie and Bobby Bevan for almost 30 years. Bobby was the son of the painters Robert Polhill Bevan and Stanislawa de Karlowska, and himself pursued a successful career in advertising with the firm of S.H. Benson, of which he eventually became chairman. (He was immortalised by Dorothy L Sayers in her 1933 novel Murder Must Advertise.) Bobby devoted much of his wealth, spare time and energy to the promotion of his parents’ reputations, and made their work the hub and focus of his own art collection. In 1946 he married Natalie Sieveking (née Denny) whom he’d first fallen in love with and proposed to 20 years before. Natalie was a great beauty and society hostess as well as being a talented painter and latterly an exuberant ceramicist. (Her ‘Elephant and Columbine’, c.1968, included here, is a particularly lively example.) The Bevans made a remarkable team and settled in Boxted House which they proceded to recreate and beautify. It became a gathering place for their friends, many of whom were artists, and was by all accounts memorable and inspiring to visit.

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