ALICE CONKLIN BEVIN
Rue de Passy, Midnight.
Oil on canvas, circa 1925. 655x540 mm; 25¾x25¼ inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto.Provenance: Private collection, New York.Bevin (1893-1969) was born in East Hampton, Connecticut and traveled throughout the world, using painting to document her itinerary and the people whom she met. She attended the Lasell Female Seminary in Boston from 1913-16 and the Hartford Art School before studying at the Art Students League in New York under George Bridgeman. After her marriage in 1922, she made her home in France, and painted scenes from her time in Brittany and Paris to show in New York, including at Studio Guild and Holt Gallery. With the onset of World War II, Bevin returned to the United States and worked out of her New York studio while maintaining residence in her hometown in Connecticut. Like her contemporaries of the American Scene, Bevin believed in painting not the idyllic country sides, but of the reality of present day. In 1938, with tensions rising in Europe, she wrote "This is not the moment to paint a beautiful bouquet of flowers or Paris under snow . . . I cannot paint trivial things today when I remember that only one week before the war began, I painted a Russian Orthodox church in Helsingfors, which today is probably a mass of smouldering ruins." Bevin's determination to document her surroundings combined with imbued soul or sense of tension creates a kinship with Edward Hopper and his contemporaries. In response to her 1939 show at Studio Guild, a reviewer wrote in The Art News, "Her particular gift seems to lie in her sense of a quiet street, buildings massed together and reflected on wet pavements."