Over the Blackdown Hills and far away
IF the question ‘what was the attraction of the Blackdown Hills for artists of the Camden Town School?’ sounds like a riddle, the answer—‘a former cattle rancher from the Argentine’—would appear to confirm it. Yet the reality was more mundane.
Harold Bertram Harrison was the rancher and the artists were Spencer Gore and Charles Ginner, plus Robert Bevan and his Polish wife, Stanislawa de Karlowska, known as Stasia. Harrison, scion of a prosperous Somerset family with Argentinian interests, was born and brought up at Waterhouse Monkton near Bath, later leaving to help run the family ranch. He returned to England in the mid 1890s and enrolled as a 41-year-old mature student at the Slade School of Fine Art, together with Augustus John, Harold Gilman and Gore, the latter becoming a particularly close friend for the rest of his
