Five ‘lost’ works from Cumbria’s greatest artist Sheila Fell have been uncovered and put on show by a Cockermouth gallery.
Aspatria-born Fell was regarded by LS Lowry as the greatest landscape artist of the age.
The works, unseen and even unknown for more than four decades, were acquired from a private collection in London.
Her work rarely strayed from the farms, fields and towns in her north west corner of Cumbria, from Aspatria and Cockermouth to Maryport and Allonby on the coast.
She painted the earth and those who worked it, depicting rich brown soils, piles of potatoes, small groups of driven cattle, indistinguishable farm buildings and the terraced houses of her hometown.
Castlegate Gallery, in Cockermouth, has been a champion of Fell’s work and in 2014 staged the largest selling exhibition since her death in 1979.
“Much of Sheila’s work could only be a product of someone raised in the western fringes of the county,” says gallery owner Steve Swallow.
“There are no ‘Lakeland’ scenes, often in her work the world is heavy and foreboding, a connection with not only the landscape but of her own state of mind.”
The exhibition, Sheila Fell – New Discoveries, from October 30 to November 20, combines the new acquisitions with six more from private collections to showcase 12 works from all three decades of Sheila’s career, in oils, charcoals and pastels.
“If fortunate, we’d usually be able to acquire maybe two or three paintings by Sheila over the course of a year,” says Steve.
“Five of our six recent acquisitions have been sourced from a private London collection and were generally unknown, not having been seen publicly on the market for 40-plus years, if at all.”
“What’s fascinating is to see how Sheila progressed as an artist,” says Steve.
“Whereas many would progress over time from early-career representational art to more relaxed, energetic freedom of a confident latter-career artist, Sheila was to generally show a progression from at times almost semi-abstract in the 50s and 60s to a much tighter representational style of the 1970s.”
Born in Aspatria in 1931, Fell’s childhood was nothing out of the ordinary in a pre- and immediately post-war world; father a miner, mother the matriarch, a family life struggling to make ends meet in a small, terraced house in an unremarkable row of similar terraces.
In her teenage years though, Sheila showed an aptitude for art. After a brief spell at Carlisle College of Art, in 1950 Sheila gained a place at the prestigious St Martin’s School of Art in London.
Steve says: “One can only imagine what it must have been like for this diminutive young woman from the wilds of Cumberland to be suddenly mixing with other students and artists who were to become some of the biggest names in British art of the last century, including Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. From contemporary accounts she certainly seems to have held her own.
Over the next two decades Fell was to emerge as one of the most important and influential landscape artists at work in the UK.
Her graduation from St Martin’s was followed by a teaching post at Chelsea College of Art and her first of many solo exhibitions at Beaux Arts, London in 1955.
“This was a hugely important step for Sheila, for Beaux Arts had become a very important nursery for the some of the most inventive, passionate and driven artists of the UK art movement from the 1950s onwards,” says Steve.
“Sheila was to become one of those and in later years recognised as such by the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts, becoming one of only 80 Academicians with the honour at any one time.”
Landscape painting was hardly at the cutting edge of art in the 1950s, says Steve, but her work had something extra.
“Although Sheila’s artworks were admittedly then ‘last century’ her method was anything but. What Sheila produced and was to become highly regarded for, were works that conveyed not just the landscape, but the impact it had on Sheila and as such, much of her mood when with paint brush in hand.”
For much of her adulthood, Fell was troubled. Her life remained firmly in the London of the 50s through to 70s. She missed her home county terribly (she largely only painted Cumberland), yet was only to return there for painting trips.
She also struck up a somewhat unlikely lasting friendship with L S Lowry. Lowry had first come across Sheila’s work at that very first Beaux Arts exhibition of 1955, acquiring a number of paintings from it for himself. Lowry was to later record that he believed Sheila was the greatest landscape artist of the age.
Fell died tragically young, aged 48. She had painted fewer than 600 works in her career, and her work comes on to the market relatively seldomly, so the chance to acquire five works ‘lost’ for decades was thrilling for Steve.
The progression in Fell’s work is starkly shown in two of the newly discovered paintings, Corn Stooks Towards Evening from 1964, and White House, Aspatria, likely painted some ten or so years later.
“They are such a world away from each other that they could understandably be mistaken for being by two totally separate artists,” says Steve.
“Corn Stooks Towards Evening is a riot of painterly energy, falling in places into abstraction, paint thickly applied, the aim seems here to be Sheila conveying what she felt rather than purely what she saw.
“White House, Aspatria, a scene literally 50 yards from her childhood home, is in comparison much more representational, tighter, reserved, a recording of a place so familiar to the artist, a painting she would have wanted to paint for myriad reasons.”
Another fascinating and very rare work on display was a charcoal portrait of Clifford Rowan, likely dating to around 1960.
“Clifford was a very important person in Sheila’s life,” says Steve. “At one time he was her partner, and in fact for several years Sheila’s daughter Anna was presented as being Clifford’s daughter, when in fact both knew this not to be the case.
“The face-on, somewhat stark, drawing of Clifford must have been given to him by Sheila, as it came to the previous owner from Clifford Rowan’s own collection, along with four of the other works we acquired.”
Steve hopes the latest exhibition manages to convey what made Sheila such a talent, not just for the county but for the wider country.
“The viewer is taken on a journey through Sheila’s career, a career Cumbria should be proud to have been witness to and to have been recorded through.
“What makes Sheila’s work so powerful is her almost unique ability to convey the emotion inherent in a landscape; not just the landscape itself, but the impact it has on you.”
Sheila Fell – New Discoveries is at Castlegate House Gallery from October 30 to November 20. To view online go to www.castlegatehouse.co.uk.