Woman in a Cornfield

Woman in a Cornfield, about 1960, oil on canvas by Sheila Fell (1931-1979).

Autumnal landscape on a cloudy day; towering fells dominate the scene, rising above a small stone farmstead standing to lower left of composition. In the foreground the lone figure of a woman stands beside a group of haystacks in a cornfield bounded by drystone walls.

Despite spending most of her time in London, Fell made frequent trips home to Aspatria. Fell was preoccupied with the area around Aspatria as an artist. The villages, cottages, farms, farm animals and people working in the fields and the Lake District fells were the subjects of her art. In her early work she used a dark colour range, as in this example, which lightened over the years. She applied her paint thickly. She was influenced by Cezanne, Van Gogh and Frank Auberbach.

Sheila Fell is a major British landscape painter of the mid 20th century and one of Cumbria’s most important 20th century artists. She was born in Aspatria and educated at Wigton and attended Carlisle College of Art 1947–9. She left Cumbria in 1949 to study at St Martin’s School of Art in London where she remained until 1951. She met L S Lowry in 1956 and they became friends. Lowry visited Aspatria and got to know Fell’s parents. Lowry’s painting did not influence Fell’s work however. Fell began exhibiting her landscape paintings at the Royal Academy in 1965 and was elected Associate in 1969 and Royal Academician in 1974.