SHEILA FELL 1931 - 1979
Date Posted: 28th November 2024
Cumberland has never been painted as I would like to see it, so I should love to do it. Cumberland is not like the rest of England. It is like no other place. Sheila Fell
Don’t miss the new Sheila Fell exhibition CUMBRIA ON CANVAS which opened last Saturday at Tullie House in Carlisle (the name has just changed to Tullie but it will always be Tullie House to me.)
Sheila Fell was born in Aspatria in 1931 and went to grammar school in Wigton. She was highly talented in music, dance and art and chose art on the advice of her art teacher Mrs Campbell Taylor and was given a place at Carlisle College of Art based in Tullie House at that time and after a year went to St Martins in London working as a barmaid at the French House in Soho to keep body and soul together. Her father was a miner with increasingly fragile health caused by injury, as well as being made redundant several times from pit closures and her mother was a seamstress and sent her regular food parcels and money from their meagre income.
Sheila Fell stands aloof from those fashionable but transitory movements which today receive so much publicity. The path she has chosen is a lonely one. The rewards are paintings – good by universal standards...Cumberland is the theme of these pictures but they speak not of a single region but of all those unspoilt places where man finds dignity. Evening Standard
Although she was living in London she painted Cumberland as she saw it rather than the ever fashionable idyllic paintings of romantic cottages and tidy villages among pretty lakes and mountains. L S Lowry visited her first exhibition at Beaux Arts Gallery in London in 1955 and despite his grumbling about the weather ( It was raining heavily and he arrived with wet feet) and the steep stairs to the exhibition he bought two of her paintings and a drawing and took her out for lunch. When she ate a lot for a very petite woman, he realized she was hungry and offered her £3 a week to keep her in art materials. To make sure he wasn’t misunderstood he went to Aspatria with her in 1956 and met her parents where he and her father built up a strong friendship. By this time he was no stranger to West Cumberland. He first came to Cleator Moor in the late 1940s and then to Maryport 1950s staying with his bank manager friend Geoffrey Bennett. When Bennett retired in 1961 he chose to take up holy orders and Lowry would visit him in Chatsworth Square in Carlisle. He also came to Aspatria first in1956 to see the stay with Sheila’s parents in Queen Street Aspatria. He would hire a taxi to take him and Sheila around finding new landscapes to paint as well as seascapes and harbours of Allonby and Maryport. Most of her work up to that point was agricultural:- brown earth, big skies, potato pickers, tractors and hay carts. You will see these in the exhibition which spans some of her school and college works all the way through to her early death in 1979. He also encouraged and sponsored Sheila to apply for membership of the Royal Academy for which she was successful – a position that is still highly coveted among artists.
Sheila Fell carries Cumberland with her wherever she goes not so much in her pocket but in her blood. W E Johnson. The Guardian January 1962
Lowry died a few days after Sheila’s father in 1976. The last exhibition in her lifetime was at the New Grafton Gallery in London in 1979. She died at the young age of 48 on 15th December 1979 out- living her mother.
This exhibition was prompted by two retired Cambridge Medics - Andrew and Eleanor Bradley who have spent the last 4/5 years on a mission to find every painting Fell did for a Catalogue Raisonnee which will be published by Lund Humphreys some time in 2025. (I will inform you when it is ready. It promises to be a mighty tome and the Bradleys are still discovering more Fells!)
Sheila left hundreds of paintings of which 95 are hung in the exhibition for you to see and enjoy. Some of them have never been seen in public before. It continues in Carlisle until 16th March 2025 when it will move East to Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens from 5th April– 28th June. (you will find opening times over Christmas/Easter on the relevant web sites)