Bevan studied at the Westminster School of Art under Fred Brown and then at Julian's in Paris. He was a painter in oils and watercolours, and a printmaker of a wide variety of subjects including landscapes, figures and horse fairs. During the 1890s he worked in Pont Aven, Brittany where he was acquainted with Gauguin. In 1897 he met the Polish artist Stanislawa de Karlowska and he subsequently married her in Poland. His first one man show was staged at the Baillie Gallery in 1905. He exhibited at the Allied Artists' Association and with the Fitzroy Street Group. An integral member of the Sickert circle, he was a founder member of the Camden Town Group and the London Group. Although often modest in scale, his paintings and lithographs showed a wonderful gift for pictorial design. Bevan painted in the Divisionist manner of Lucien Pissarro, whom he admired, but modified it in the direction of the pure colour and flat patterning of Gauguin. His horse subjects in particular received much critical acclaim. The critic Frank Rutter said of him: "He was one of the most essentially English painters of his time." In 2008 a major book about his life and work by Frances Stenlake, Robert Bevan from Gauguin to Camden Town, was published by Unicorn Press.