Retired Cambridge academics writing book about Cumbrian great Sheila Fell

For the past five years, former Cambridge academics Professor Andrew Bradley and Dr Eleanor Bradley have been searching the country for Fell’s paintings and have now catalogued and photographed over 400 of her works.

Sheila Fell was a proud Cumbrian artist. Born in Aspatria in 1931 during the Great Depression to a working-class family, Fell went on to become an important landscape artist in the post-war period.

Her subject was the harsh rural landscape around Aspatria where she had spent her childhood and war-time adolescence.

“Cumberland is very dark, but being dark it is also very brilliant,” she once wrote.

Fell captured on canvas the very essence of the West Cumbrian landscape – atmospheric and brooding paintings of windswept farms, potato pickers at work in the fields, men harvesting wheat, and women driving cows along country roads.

Potato Picking, Clouds, 1979 (Image: Dr Andrew Bradley)A pupil at Thomlinson Girls’ Grammar School in Wigton, Fell spent two years at Carlisle College of Art before leaving Cumbria when she was 18 years old to study at St Martin’s School of Art in London.

READ MORE: Councillors and the public discuss the conversion of Whitehaven's Wesleyan Methodist Church

During Fell’s lifetime her paintings were praised by the critics and bought by the many of the country’s public art galleries, including the Tate and became one of the few female Royal Academicians.

Tragically, Fell died suddenly in 1979 at the age of only 48 years whilst at the height of her artistic powers.

Wheat Harvest at Mexchi Farm, Cumberland, 1968 (Image: Dr Andrew Bradley)Since her death, the importance of her contribution to British art may have been unfairly overshadowed - like that of many female painters of the time - by her male contemporaries.

The authors of the book are keen to hear from anyone who may have a painting by Fell and owners’ details will be treated in strict confidence.

Anyone who owns a work by Sheila Fell who has not yet had contact with the Bradleys is invited to contact them via email at Jab52@cam.ac.uk, phone at 07487 259988 or their website www.sheilafell.com.

READ MORE: Polls suggest Starmer more popular than Sunak across Cumbria