Framing Sheila Fell (1931–1979) as a social realist

 

 

Andrew & Eleanor Bradley

 

 

 

Amid the hardship, deprivation and chaos of post-war developments in 1950s London a new era of optimism, political reform, and social change was unfolding. A raft of legislation brought in by the Attlee Labour government after the 1945 landslide election had led to radical expansion of the welfare state and nationalisation of key industries. Meanwhile, young people were challenging the traditional and restrictive social norms, and a new rebellious youth culture was emerging. London’s art schools were populated by students determined to distance themselves from what they regarded as the mannered and inward-looking art establishment. Julian Spalding, in his catalogue essay for the 1984 ‘The Forgotten Fifties’ exhibition, one of the first to re-examine this period, evoked this shift of mood.^[1]

The ex-servicemen who filled the art schools after the war were aggressive and determined to build their own world… The veins of neo-romanticism, surrealism and Euston Road realism which had been at their richest before the war and were artificially extended by it, appeared to these young men as tired, passé, insular, introspective, escapist and tame. They wanted an art for their own age… based on real experience, on life as it is.^[2]

Their ambition was to capture what John Berger called ‘lived experience’ in the world around them, be it the bombed parts of Sheffield or simply the clutter on the breakfast table. In the 1950s a new form of modern realism emerged – direct, uncompromising, austere and often conceived on a large scale in a style that referenced European expressionism. John Bratby, Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith took their inspiration from the mundane domestic interiors they inhabited, earning them the title ‘Kitchen Sink’ painters, while Peter Coker painted carcasses hanging in a local butcher’s shop. Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff were inspired by the lines and angles of the massive building sites of inner-city London. Sheila Fell was unique among her painter-friends living in London in that her favoured subject was the remembered environment of her Cumberland childhood and adolescence, which she expressed in the non-picturesque, gritty aesthetic of post-war modernism.

 

 

The works illustrated are by Sheila Fell RA (1931–1979). Sheila Fell artworks are copyright of the artist’s estate and the authors are grateful to Anna Fell for permission to publish images of the paintings

1 Aspatria, Cumbria, Winter, c1974. Oil on canvas, 76 x 101.5 cm. Private collection

 

 

She was nudged towards this obsession by her intense homesickness on first arriving in London to study at St Martin’s School of Art. A common thread linking Fell with the other young London artists of her generation was their effort to depict not a stylised, illusionary or imaginary subject but the real ‘true-to-life’ environment, inevitably man-made or at least, as in Fell’s case, shaped by man.

A retrospective travelling exhibition has recently brought a large body of Fell’s work to the attention of a new generation of viewers.^[3] It coincides with our publication of a catalogue raisonné of Fell’s oil paintings, which includes informative essays on her background, inspiration and contemporary art styles, and this new exposure provides an opportunity critically to address Fell’s contribution to 20th-century British art.^[4]

In 1963, the BBC arts television programme Monitor ran a film called ‘Two Border Artists’ featuring Sheila Fell and Norman Cornish.^[5] It was produced and directed by Melvyn Bragg, at a time when Fell was exhibiting regularly at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London.^[6] Fell and Cornish are both depicted as irrevocably anchored in ‘the North’ but striking contrasts are drawn between them. The older and self-taught Cornish is portrayed as a local celebrity who is still working in the Durham coal fields, and whose life is inseparable from that depicted in his paintings. Fell, on the other hand, is portrayed as a young professional London-based artist visiting her home in Cumberland to make sketches of her subject before returning south to her studio to use them to inform her paintings. To add to the visual appeal of the programme Fell is filmed sketching in locations within the Lake District National Park. The dramatic mountain scenery adds greatly to the atmosphere of the film but unintentionally sets the tone for labelling Fall as a painter of landscapes, a description that inadequately captures the full reach of her art.

This article refutes the popularised notion that Fell was simply a landscape artist, seeking instead to show that while the rural land around her hometown of Aspatria in west Cumbria remained her principal subject, she was painting not purely landscape but rather the land that man lived on, worked upon, shaped, exploited and used to earn a living. From her London studio, Fell painted the reality of the harsh climate, the physicality and hardship of working on and in the land, the day-to-day occupation of the people dear to her, among whom she grew up, matured and was educated. In a sense, the topography was important only in providing the context to the materiality of daily life. Sheila Fell, we suggest, is more accurately classified as a social realist rather than as a landscape artist.

 

Breakthrough

The depth of feeling and the authenticity that characterise Fell’s work is strongly rooted in her working-class background and early childhood experiences in Aspatria, the small mining and agricultural town midway between the Solway Firth and the edge of the Lake District National Park. In the 1968 publication Breakthrough, Fell is one of eleven individuals (only two of whom were women) who describe how, despite unpromising, working-class, socially disadvantaged beginnings, they made an educational breakthrough to achieve a high level of professional success.^[7] In her biographical account Fell recalls the vivid childhood images that were later to inform her paintings, thus: ‘Cumberland is a county of sloping hillsides, mines and farmsteads, with the wind blowing in great gusts across the miles of bare earth’,^[8] and Aspatria is a village ‘surrounded by fields of barley and potatoes’. She describes memories of ‘farm carts, ricketing past the house, full of hay or turnips, and cows threading their way from milking sheds to grazing fields’, along with the sight of miners ‘strung out along the road or crouching… shivering against the morning cold’. These visions are recurring themes in her work.

Born in 1931, Sheila Mary Fell was the only child of Jack, a coalminer, and Ann Fell (née Graham), a seamstress.^[9] The family home was a small two-bedroom terraced cottage on the edge of the town and adjacent to the railway line, as depicted at the far left of one of her late paintings Aspatria, Cumbria, Winter (Pl 1) – a bleak nostalgic scene dominated by the dark shape of the Methodist Chapel that was central to the life of Fell’s mother.

From the 14th century onwards most of Fell’s paternal ancestors had been local farmers until, eventually, her grandfather was forced to seek employment in the coal mines. Fell was born during the Great Depression and Aspatria’s coal mines were in sharp decline. Two years later Aspatria was included in the Special Areas Act of Parliament as being one of the areas with the highest unemployment in the UK and in need of government intervention. Her father struggled to find suitable work and her family had little material wealth, although Fell enjoyed a happy and protected childhood and received a good education at the girls’ grammar school in nearby Wigton. Encouraged by her school art teacher, Fell attended Carlisle School of Art for two years, where she was steered towards secure employment as a fabric designer in the local textile industry. The strong-minded and ambitious Fell, however, had other ideas. Seeking instead to broaden her horizons and pursue her dreams of becoming a painter she enrolled at St Martin’s School of Art in London’s Charing Cross Road where her teachers were Vivian Pitchforth and John Napper, while her contemporaries included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Joe Tilson, Donald Hamilton Fraser and Peter Kinley.

 

A human presence

In her seminal analysis Artists Making Landscapes in Post-war Britain, Margaret Garlake notes how artists such as Fell intuitively recognise the reciprocity between people and landscape, and how in her paintings Fell regards ‘landscape-as-dwelling, implying a way of living grounded in an unspoken, habitual knowledge of the local terrain and weather shared by people and animals profoundly familiar with them’.^[10]

Fell herself stated in 1961, ‘I do not want to be thought of purely as a landscape painter. I hope that the nearby community is always implicit in my landscapes.’^[11] She also felt that while her work had a narrow geographical focus on a small area of Cumberland, it represented a microcosm of rural life everywhere.^[12]

While Fell did not always include figures in her early paintings, the presence of the local community in her work is always unmistakable, as in Houses near No.5 Pit (Pl 2) which earned Fell second prize (after Bratby) in the Junior section of the first (1957) John Moores exhibition.

 

 

2 Houses near No.5 Pit, 1955. Oil on canvas, 127.5 x 103 cm. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

 

 

The picture references Fell’s mining heritage – her father worked at Brayton Domain No.5 pit, the last of Aspatria’s mines – but the mine had closed, and the pit-head buildings and winding gear had been demolished over a decade before this painting was made. Like many of her early paintings, Houses near No.5 Pit is completed using a restricted palette of dark earth colours, although it is not as devoid of light as some of her early paintings. This dark and sombre aesthetic was what Fell and others sought, and in any case most young artists found bright oil pigments unaffordable. In Fell’s case the use of earth pigments had an added poignancy: as James Hyman points out, she was effectively ‘restoring paint to its organic and natural origins’.^[13] The large vertical canvas used in Houses near No.5 Pit, and many others of Fell’s early works, emphasises the steep hillside that characteristically extends almost to the upper edge of the support, where the summit ridge is typically silhouetted against tracts of white pigment. The basis for these paintings was probably derived from childhood interpretation of her experiences, such as when the teenage Fell was returning home from a school trip to the Netherlands, she recalled a vision of suddenly seeing the mountains: ‘Black and hostile… slab over slab they rose up and enveloped us like a gigantic frightening wall nearly touching the glass and shutting out the sky… although I’d lived among them for years, it was the first time I ever saw them.’^[14]

The harsh reality of rural life in Aspatria is made clear by Fell in the stark painting Woman in the Snow (Pl 3), another early work, that includes a solitary female figure in the foreground, feeding poultry with grain from her gathered apron. Her dark form is solid and simplified and her facial features unresolved, emphasising her universality. As Jeremy Hooker observes, she is conceived on a heroic scale, and has ‘a dependable solidity, and is more like a Tolstoyan peasant than one of Hardy’s figures, “slighted and enduring” ’.^[15]

 

 

3 Woman in the Snow, 1955. Oil on canvas, 77 x 101.5 cm.
Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London

 

 

Early works such as this were generally well received by the broadsheet critics, but their bleakness often prompted headings such as ‘A haunted landscape’, ‘Grim and brooding’, and ‘Dark satanic mills’.^[16]

Snowscapes are a common theme throughout Fell’s oeuvre and reached their peak around 1960–1 with a large series of paintings of the flat Solway Plain blanketed by thick snow. They are sombre and melancholic works that expose the hardship and isolation of working and living on the land in an unforgiving and unpredictable northern climate. Painted in sepia tones that recall the paintings of Constant Permeke, the smaller works are simplified almost to the point of abstraction, whereas in the larger canvases horizontal rows of dark hedges recede rhythmically into the far distance, creating the illusion of space and depth. Many of these snowscapes are devoid of figures but a human presence is always inferred by the scattered homesteads half buried by snow. In a number of works, the rounded forms of colossal haystacks dominate the foreground, as in Haystacks in Winter (Pl 4). Often larger than a house, such haystacks were skilfully constructed to withstand heavy rain and gales. They were a commanding symbol of the fertility of the land and an essential resource for sustaining livestock over the long winter months.

 

 

4 Haystacks in Winter, c1961. Oil on canvas, 101.5 x 127 cm. Private collection

 

 

By 1960 labourers working on the land had become an integral element in many of Fell’s paintings. The October potato harvest was one of her favourite subjects, and she particularly appreciated the melancholic beauty of Autumn. Most of the potato pickers were local women and children and, while it was back-breaking work from dawn to dusk, the workers enjoyed a degree of camaraderie, and the modest amount of money earned was a welcome addition to the family finances. Potato Pickers I (Pl 5) is a large and widely exhibited early example.

 

 

5 Potato Pickers I, 1960. Oil on canvas, 127 x 101.5 cm.
Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London

 

 

By the time this work was completed Fell had lightened her palette a little and abandoned the use of the strong vertical tree motifs common in her paintings from the 1950s. The flowing organic contours in this painting are a universal feature in all of Fell’s work. She often adopted an unnaturally elevated viewpoint to allow the topography of the middle ground to be seen to better effect, as in Potato Pickers I, where a group of workers and nearby tractor and trailer in the middle distance are dwarfed by the vastness of the potato field and height of the hills towering above them.

 

Helen Lessore and the Beaux Arts Gallery

Fell’s widespread renown during the 1960s may be attributed to her great good fortune in being given her first solo exhibition by Helen Lessore at the London Beaux Arts Gallery. She was only 24 when the show opened in December 1955, making her one of the youngest artists in the gallery’s history, and the importance of Lessore’s support and guidance cannot be overstated. It was also at her first show that Fell encountered and became close friends with the elderly and influential LS Lowry. Lessore gave Fell a further four solo shows at the Beaux Arts Gallery (1958, 1960, 1962, and 1964), cementing her reputation as one of the most talented painters of her generation. After Greaves and Auerbach, Fell was the third most exhibited artist at the Beaux Arts Gallery.

Helen Lessore, the Slade-trained director of the gallery, was almost unique among London’s West End gallerists in showing the work of young non-established artists. Only figurative art interested her, and she showed only those artists whom she thought would one day be regarded as among the most successful of their time. Lessore herself had won first prize for painting at the Slade and was ruthless in her selection: her touchstone when assessing the many young painters seeking to show their work was Walter Sickert, whose dark and subdued pictures of everyday life are echoed in the works of many of the artists shown by Lessore, including Fell. For a few short years, when modern realist art prevailed in post-war London, the Beaux Arts Gallery was at the forefront of new developments, reaching its apotheosis in 1956 when four of its social realist artists (the ‘Beaux Arts Quartet’ of Bratby, Greaves, Middleditch and Smith) represented Britain at the Venice Biennale.

 

The dignity of the ordinary

While Fell remained consistent in her depictions of the veracity and mundanity of rural Cumbrian occupations, her style of painting developed and matured over time. She looked to the European Masters for inspiration, including Daumier, Cézanne, Gauguin, Permeke and, above all, Van Gogh. From each she selected what she needed to inform her personal visual language at different timepoints in her career, although her style always remained emphatically her own. In terms of their subjects, Daumier’s social commentary and sympathy for the urban working-class presumably resonated with Fell’s working-class background, while Permeke confirmed for Fell the importance and vigour of the rural landscape and the dignity of the hardy labourers who made their living from it. Similarly, she must have found Van Gogh’s early drawings and paintings of peasants planting and harvesting potatoes a reassuring precedent for her own paintings. Her work echoes Van Gogh’s life-long concern for the ordinary workers and, through Van Gogh, she was following in the footsteps of Jean-François Millet and the Barbizon School of rural realist painters who depicted non-idealised peasants labouring on the land. Fell’s choice of subject aligns her firmly with European-inspired social realism although, like both Van Gogh and Millet, she was not seeking to make a political or social statement through her work. She was simply painting life on the land as she saw and remembered it.

By the early 1960s Fell’s reputation was secure and her work was selling well. She also had a part-time teaching post at Chelsea College of Art and could now afford paint and canvases more easily. Moreover, she was in complete control of her medium, combining a bold expressionist approach to her subject with an interest in the physical properties of paint and the texture of the painted surface. Her confidence and creative talent in the mid-1960s is readily apparent in the heavily impastoed Men in Potato Field (Pl 6).

 

 

6 Men in Potato Field, 1964. Oil on canvas, 45.5 x 56 cm. Private collection

 

 

The scumbled sky and the green and orange horizontal bands are thickly painted but the impasto of the brown paint in the foreground is so heavily applied that it takes on the three-dimensional form of the furrowed earth it depicts, and the small stooping figures working in the fields are barely discernible, save for the colour of their shirts.

Men Working in a Cornfield II (Pl 7) is another highly impastoed and expressionistic painting from the same year and belongs to a series of works where Fell was, for a brief period, experimenting with uncharacteristically bright colours – yellows, golds and reds – using swirling brush strokes to capture the strong light from the sun that she perceived as a mass of bright conflicting lights that tended to obliterate form.^[17]

 

 

7 Men Working in a Cornfield II 1964. Oil on canvas, 101.5 x 126.5 cm.
Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal

 

 

Fell became increasingly interested in Van Gogh from the mid-1960s and the heavily laden brushwork that conferred rhythm and energy to his late paintings strongly influenced her own work, as in Wheat Harvest at Mechi Farm, Cumberland I (Pl 8). She was by now also paying more attention to the importance of the sky in setting the emotional tone of her compositions: the billowing cumulus clouds massing above the horizon in this work are enlivened by strong accents of purple, mauve and yellow, adding to the drama of the scene below.

 

 

8 Wheat Harvest at Mechi Farm, Cumberland I, 1968. Oil on canvas, 51 x 61 cm.
Private collection

 

 

A ‘very sincere artist’

Fell was resolute in pursuing her own distinctive path, seemingly impervious to prevailing fashions. It was not that she was unaware of or uninterested in new developments in the visual arts. She socialised widely with other artists, regularly attended exhibitions, and was in close touch with trends in London’s arts schools. The pressure on Fell to adapt her practice in response to new developments must have been intense but, like Auerbach and Kossoff, she had the strength of character and conviction to resist the rapidly changing art fashions of her time.

By the time of her fifth and final solo show at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1964 contemporary tastes had undergone a profound change. The 1959 Tate exhibition of American Abstract Expressionism, ‘The New American Painting’, had been a revelation for British artists and many responded by moving towards abstraction. Then two years later the seminal ‘Young Contemporaries Exhibition’ at the Royal Society of British Artists (RBA) Galleries in London brought pop art to the fore. The quality of Fell’s latest work was undeniable and the critics rated it highly. But both Fell and her critics were well aware that her genre of work was no longer fashionable and was even thought by some to be irrelevant. Committed figurative artists such as Fell and a small number of her close contemporaries now stood apart from the latest artistic trends and were sidelined by them.

In early 1965 the Beaux Arts Gallery, with its strong focus on figurative painting, was forced to close – a victim of current trends and harsh commercial reality. Some of Helen Lessore’s painters were offered exhibitions at the prestigious Marlborough Gallery, including Auerbach, Kossoff and Aitchison, where their reputations were promoted nationally and internationally. But Fell, who perhaps was somewhat diffident and did not care for self-promotion, was not among them. It may be that a female painter of drab scenes of Cumbria was deemed to be commercially unattractive to a London gallery, or it is possible that Fell, who was distrustful of most art dealers, chose not to pursue another gallery in the capital. Undeterred, Fell exhibited at well-respected venues in the north of England but her shows attracted relatively little attention from London’s major critics.^[18] Her new work in the late 1960s remained largely unchanged – thickly painted expressionistic tableaus of women and cows in country lanes, winter fields, and harvesting scenes, often under blackening skies, as in Planting Potatoes III (Pl 9).

 

 

9 Planting Potatoes III, 1967. Oil on canvas, 86.5 x 112 cm.
Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne

 

 

Fell’s friend, mentor and patron LS Lowry was a source of considerable support in difficult times. Without him, Fell wrote, ‘My life would have been infinitely poorer and his unfailing and continuous encouragement, concern and help to me with my work opened up new avenues and kept me plodding on when times were bleak.’^[19] For his part Lowry, said of her in the 1968 film, made for television, Mister Lowry, ‘The quality [of her work] is so poetic it attracts me very much – more than anybody else today – I think she’s a very sincere artist.’^[20] By which he presumably meant that her paintings directly expressed her genuine emotions, experience, and personal world, rather than conforming to the prevailing artistic fashions, which is a very exact description of Fell.

 

Late works

During the 1970s Fell’s paintings show increasing sharpness. The heavy impasto of the previous decade is less apparent and the various elements in the composition are more fully resolved, although her brush work loses none of its vitality. As noted by Helen Lessore, a ‘new beauty’ emerged as the artist examined her subject with renewed attention, ‘… seeing them herself as “new”, and translating them with mature power’.^[21] Harvesting scenes below threatening and atmospheric clouds are a common theme, as in Potato Fields towards Evening (Pl 10), in which animated labourers are still hard at work as darkness advances. In this scene potatoes have been piled into heaps, ready to be covered with straw for storage in clamps over the winter months.

 

 

10 Potato Field towards Evening, 1973/4. Oil on canvas, 71 x 91.5 cm. Private collection

 

 

In tandem with painting Cumberland farming scenes, Fell also developed a fascination with the old lead-mining village of Greenhow high above the Yorkshire Dales.^[22] Once the centre of a busy community, the village had become depopulated by the early 20th century, as lead-mining had all but ceased. Many of the surrounding cottages had fallen into ruin, although some families stayed on to farm the thin acid soil. While painting the isolated farms and ruined cottages, Fell must have been acutely aware of the parallels between the decline of lead mining in Greenhow and of coal mining in Aspatria.

In the last decade of her life Fell’s productivity was consistent and the quality of her work undeniable. She was elected an Associate Member of the Royal Academy in 1969, and a Royal Academician in 1974, and seemed content simply to show six paintings each year at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, where they sold well and were usually singled out for praise in the Daily Telegraph by Terence Mullaly – one of Fell’s most loyal critics.^[23] But she held only two solo exhibitions in the 1970s, the second of which was in 1979 at the New Grafton Gallery – her first exhibition in London for 15 years.^[24] Her subject was unchanged: nearly all the works shown were farming scenes and many depicted the October potato harvest.

Fell had faced a number of difficulties in her personal life during her later years and suffered from periodic episodes of social anxiety, and excessive alcohol consumption. The stress of working late into the night for her last London exhibition had also taken its toll and, tragically, she died from accidental acute alcohol poisoning on 15 December, while the exhibition was still running. The sense of isolation that she was experiencing may be reflected in some of her late works, such as Snowscape, Cumbria (Pl 11), where the outline of a tiny solitary farmer is just visible to the right of centre.

 

 

11 Snowscape, Cumbria, c1976. Oil on canvas, 71.5 x 91.5 cm. Museums Sheffield

 

 

Looking beyond Aspatria

In seeking to make the case that Fell is a social realist painter it must be acknowledged that, perhaps inevitably, not all of her work addresses man’s relationship with the land. She painted, for example, five well regarded large portraits during the early part of her career: one of her fellow art student and friend Clifford Rowan (1951/2), three of her mother (c1954, 1956/7 and c1963), and a commissioned portrait of the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dorothy Hodgkin (1962). She also painted numerous coastal scenes, predominantly of the small village of Allonby some six miles from Aspatria, where her main concern was the changing relationship between the sea, sky and shore. These pictures are mostly on small or medium-sized canvases and she once stated to the press (possibly in haste) that she only painted the coast when there was no activity on the land.^[25] At the insistence of Lowry, Fell also visited the town of Maryport on occasion to sketch, and later in her studio she completed several paintings of Maryport Harbour, including a large-scale example held by the Tate. This highlights another issue that may have contributed to Fell’s categorisation as mainly a painter of landscapes. Maryport Cumbria, a large and atmospheric painting of the harbour, is used to illustrate Fell’s entry in the book Tate Women Artists, rather than one of the two Aspatria snowscapes also in the Tate collection.^[26] Additionally, one of Fell’s most-reproduced images, Skiddaw, Summer (Pl 12), is used, for example, to illustrate Fell’s entry in the Dictionary of Women Artists.^[27]

 

 

12 Skiddaw, Summer, 1963. Oil on canvas, 71 x 91.5 cm. Private collection

 

 

The painting is a view of the southern flank of the fourth highest peak in the Lake District, with the picturesque village of Applethwaite nestled at its base. It is a beautifully painted and readily accessible work with great visual appeal, but it is not typical of Fell’s rural subjects. The latter two works appear in numerous reviews of Fell’s exhibitions and their widespread publication risks reinforcing the view that Fell is simply a painter of northern landscapes.

 

Legacy

Sheila Fell’s emotional response to Cumberland endows her paintings with a poetic force that transcends the ordinariness of her subject. Her style remains firmly aligned with post-war modern realism but gradually evolves as her vision matured and her artistic influences changed. The dark, haunting and dreamlike paintings of the 1950s give way to a more expressionistic and heavily impastoed style in the 1960s, before a gradual return to thinner paint and increased clarity of vision in the 1970s. The core subject of her work, however, remains constant throughout her oeuvre: man’s relationship with the land and, more specifically, the ordinary working-class people living on and making their living from it. The Aspatria that Fell knew as a child and young woman underwent major changes during her lifetime: farms became more specialised, the planting and harvesting of crops was increasingly mechanised, and ancient hay-meadows gradually disappeared. Her paintings recall a bygone era in which local people were more connected with the land and with each other within their community. As the poet Norman Nicholson concluded: ‘In her pictures… we can see how men working in the fields are almost indistinguishable from the earth on which they live. In Sheila Fell’s work, we face up to one of the basic facts of our existence – our dependence on nature, on the soil, and on the seasons.’^[28]

The quality of Fell’s work and the large number of her paintings and drawings held in UK public institutions ensures the survival of her legacy. To regard her as simply a ‘painter of landscapes’, however, does not accurately reflect her rightful place in the art-historical narrative. Worse, it risks relegating her to the position of a ‘regional painter’. Sheila Fell should be remembered as one of the most important artists of the post-war period – a London-based social realist painter whose subject has universal relevance. In a predominantly urban society, her paintings are a potent reminder of the need to manage the land more sensitively to ensure it will sustain future generations.

 

 

The authors are grateful to Frances Spalding for many insightful discussions about Sheila Fell and for her helpful comments on this paper.

1. The exhibition showed work from 59 artists (including Sheila Fell) and opened at the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, in March 1984, before travelling to Norwich Castle Museum, the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry, and Camden Arts Centre, London. ↑
2. Julian Spalding, The Forgotten Fifties, exh cat., Sheffield 1984, p18. ↑
3. ‘Cumberland on Canvas’, Tullie, Carlisle, 23 November 2024–16 March 2025; Sunderland Museum and Winter Garden, 10 April–28 June 2025 ↑
4. Andrew Bradley and Eleanor Bradley, Lund Humphries, Sheila Fell: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, London 2025. ↑
5. Two Border Artists: Norman Cornish and Sheila Fell, Monitor, BBC, 23 June 1963. ↑
6. Melvyn Bragg was born in Carlisle and brought up in Wigton, only nine miles from Aspatria and, like Fell before him, has a great affinity and understanding of the people and topography of west Cumbria. ↑
7. Sheila Fell, in Breakthrough: Autobiographical Accounts of the Education of Some Socially Disadvantaged Children, ed Ronald Goldman, London 1968, p57. ↑
8. The ancient county of Cumberland was subsumed into Cumbria in 1974. ↑
9. For biographical information on Sheila Fell see Cate Haste, Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint, Farnham 2010, and Bradley and Bradley, 2025. ↑
10. Margaret Garlake, Artists Making Landscapes in Post-war Britain, London 2021, pp113–4. ↑
11. Sheila Fell – Notes, The Painter & Sculptor, vol 4, no. 2, 1961, p13. ↑
12. Ibid, p12. ↑
13. James Hayman, The Battle for Realism: Figurative Art in Britain During the Cold War 1945–1960, New Haven and London 2001, p196. ↑
14. Sheila Fell in Goldman 1968, p69. ↑
15. Jeremy Hooker, The Experience of Landscape: Painting and Poetry, exh cat., London 1987, p14. ↑
16. These were typical of the headings used by anonymous reviews in, among other newspapers, The Times, 25 July 1955, The Times, 6 December 1955, and the Cumberland Times, 6 August 1955. ↑
17. Sheila Fell in an interview at the Abott Hall Art Gallery in Kendal broadcast by Border television 6 July 1965. ↑
18. Fell held solo exhibitions at: Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, 1965; Queen Square Gallery, Leeds, 1965; Stone Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1967 and 1969. ↑
19. Sheila Fell, Tribute to Lowry, L S Lowry RA 1887–1976, exh cat., London 1976, p39. ↑
20. LS Lowry, in Mister Lowry, produced and directed by Robert Tyrrell, Tyne Tees Television, 1968, broadcast ITV (Tyne Tees) 30 March 1971 (a publicly accessible copy is available at Lowry, Salford). ↑
21. Helen Lessore, ‘The work of Sheila Fell’, in Sheila Fell, exh cat., London 1990, p9. ↑
22. Andrew Bradley, Eleanor Bradley, Love of the Landscape, Yorkshire Life, November 2021, pp276–9. ↑
23. For a comprehensive list of Mullaly’s comments on Fell’s work at the RA Summer exhibitions see Bradley and Bradley, 2025, p29. ↑
24. During the 1970s Fell held solo exhibitions at the Ashgate Gallery, Farnham, in 1974 and at the New Grafton Gallery, London. ↑
25. Peter Anthony, ‘Peter Anthony’s Journal: A Gathering of the Clan’, The Journal (Newcastle upon Tyne), 19 May 1967. ↑
26. Alicia Foster, Tate Women Artists, London 2004, p97. ↑
27. Ann Jones, ‘Sheila Fell’, in Dictionary of Women Artists, vol. I, ed Delia Gaze, London p514. ↑
28. Norman Nicholson, quoted in a letter from the Revd RT Brookes (producer at the BBC) to Sheila Fell, 14 December 1965 (Sheila Fell Estate). ↑