Sheila Fell R.A.

(British, 1931-1979)

Autumn, Cumbria 101.6 x 126.5 cm. (40 x 49 3/4 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
Sale; Mitchell's Antiques & Fine Art, Cockermouth, 21 March 2014, lot 749
With Castlegate House Gallery, Cockermouth, 2014, where acquired by
Private Collection, U.K., 2018, from whom acquired by
Castlegate House Gallery, 2020, where acquired by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, New Grafton Gallery, Sheila Fell, 15 November-20 December 1979, cat.no.3
London, Royal Academy of Arts, Summer Exhibition, 1980, cat.no.72
Kendal, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Through Women's Eyes: Three Women Artists in the 20th Century, 4 March-7 May 1989 (unnumbered)
Salford, Museum and Art Gallery, Sheila Fell, October 21-2 December 1990, cat.no.55 (col.ill., p.31); this exhibition travelled to London, Royal Academy of Arts, 15 December 1990-15 January 1991; Ayr, Rozelle House, 26 January-March 9 1991; Kendal, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, 16 March-28 April; Eastbourne, Towner Art Gallery, 11 May-23 June 1991; Jarrow, Bede Gallery, 4 July-11 August 1991
London, Offer Waterman, Sheila Fell: A Loan Exhibition, 8-29 October 2010 (unnumbered)
Carlisle, Tullie Museum & Art Gallery, Sheila Fell: Cumberland on Canvas, 23 November-16 March 2025, cat.no.91; this exhibition travelled to Sunderland, Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens, 10 April-28 June 2025 (unnumbered)
London, Hayward Gallery (catalogue untraced) (a loan arranged by The Royal Academy)

Literature
Cate Haste, Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2010, p.104 (col.ill., p.105)
J. Andrew Bradley and Eleanor Bradley, Sheila Fell: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2025, p.407, cat.no.428 (col.ill.)

Painted in the final decade of Sheila Fell's life, Autumn, Cumbria shows an artist working with assurance and maturity. By the mid-1970s Fell had achieved national recognition: she was elected a Royal Academician in 1974 and was widely regarded as one of Britain's leading landscape painters. Yet even as her career was centred in London, her subject remained constant; the Cumbrian countryside of her childhood, which continued to provide the raw material and emotional charge for her art.

In the present work, the landscape is stark, stripped of pastoral sentiment. A brooding autumnal sky hangs low over darkened earth, its weight pressing down on the solitary figure below. At first glance the palette appears sombre, dominated by earthy browns and greys, but within this density are flashes of strange radiance: a glimmer of blue, an accent of white, a streak of green that shimmers against the gloom. Fell's late paintings often balanced darkness with light, conveying not only the severity of the Cumbrian climate but also its sudden moments of luminosity.

In these years, Fell revisited earlier themes with renewed confidence and maturity. Critics remarked on this quality. Helen Lessore, one of her supporters, praised the late work as "as personal as ever" but animated by "a new beauty," born from the artist's excitement at studying familiar subjects afresh (Helen Lessore, 'The Work of Sheila Fell', in Sheila Fell, exh.cat. Southbank Centre, London, 1990). Autumn, Cumbria reflects this duality: at once grounded in longstanding motifs, such as the solitary human presence and the dramatic interplay of land and sky, yet rendered with a new expressive power.

Autumn, Cumbria can also be read as a meditation on endurance. Fell had always regarded the people of Cumberland as inseparable from its land: their labour, traditions, and resilience were woven into the soil itself. The solitary figure here is not dwarfed by the weight of the landscape but embedded within it, part of a wider story of human persistence in the face of nature's harshness.

By the time the present work was painted, Fell had mastered her pictorial language. The heavy impasto, the thick ridges of paint, and the almost sculptural quality of the surface embody the very substance of Cumberland's earth. Yet there is also an emotional resonance, a rhythm between land, figure and sky that elevates the scene beyond the descriptive.

Sheila Fell died in 1979 at the age of just 48, shortly after her final exhibition at the New Grafton Gallery. Works such as Autumn, Cumbria stand as a testament to an artist who remained unwaveringly true to her vision: unromantic, unsentimental, and profoundly moving in their evocation of a lived landscape.

We are grateful to Professor J. Andrew Bradley for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.