Sheila Fell was a British artist who grew up in Aspatria, Cumberland, and lived and worked in London. A contemporary and friend of Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and others, she graduated from Saint Martin’s School of Art and painted strong and atmospheric images of her native countryside. Her artworks are frequently dark and brooding, and were informed by painting trips during her regular visits to stay at her family home in Aspatria. She was elected to membership of the Royal Academy in 1974 and is regarded as one of the foremost British landscape artists of the mid-20th century. Your Sheila Fell artwork most likely features in our recently published catalogue raisonné.

We’d still love to hear from you if you have a Sheila Fell painting that we haven’t seen! And thank you to all of those wonderful people who have welcomed us into their homes to photograph their Fell paintings for the book, not to mention curators of public collections and owners of commercial galleries.

Looking back:   Since June 2019 we have travelled to visit owners of Fell paintings in many parts of the country and have photographed around 400 paintings. We have met so many lovely people, all of whom have a great fondness for their paintings; our many and varied encounters have been an unexpected and enormously rewarding highlight of this catalogue raisonné project. Our visits turned out to be pretty straightforward and, we hope, fairly unobtrusive; we were sometimes able to take advantage of the summer weather to photograph paintings out of doors in natural light – frequently an astonishing experience for us and for the owners as Fell’s palette turns out to be vibrant and full of unexpected flashes of bright colour.

Please do contact us if you own a painting by Sheila Fell