The Turn-Rice Plough, Sussex

In 1905 and 1906, Robert Bevan spent two consecutive summers without his family at a cottage called St. Ives in the hamlet of Kingston in East Sussex. Three notebooks are populated with drawings from this period, many of them sketched in the South Downs near Lewes. The present independent sheet is a preparatory sketch for Ploughing the Downs, ca. 1906 (oil on canvas, Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museum Collections, ABDAG002291). The painting was exhibited in June 1908 at the Baillie Gallery in London along with 24 other paintings by Bevan of South Downs subjects. In both the drawing and painting, a man works with a turnwrest, a heavy wooden device that was used by Sussex farmers until it was outmoded in the 1920s.