Still Life with Flowers and Spotted Dog

Born in Bristol, Fedden studied at the Slade School of Fine Arts, 1932 to 1936, before returning to Bristol for the war years when she worked in the Land Army and the Woman’s Voluntary Service. Returning to London she worked as a stage painter for the Arts Theatre in Great Newport Street and produced propaganda murals. In 1944 she was called up, and sent abroad as a driver for the NAAFI. It was not until 1946, the date of the current work, that she resumed her easel painting. She held her first exhibition at the Mansard Gallery in Heal’s Department Store in 1947, showing a number of still life and flower paintings. In 1951 she married the artist Julian Trevelyan and they shared a studio together at their Thames side home in Chiswick. From 1956 to 1956 she taught painting at the Royal College of Art where her pupils included David Hockney and Allen Jones. She later taught at the Yehudi Menuhin School in Cobham, Surrey. Fedden developed her own very distinctive style of flower and still life painting and had numerous one-man exhibitions in London and elsewhere. A major exhibition of her work was held at the Royal West of England Academy in 1996. This work comes from the collection of the artist Charles Maresco Pearce (1874-1964). A pupil of August John, William Orpen and Walter Sickert, Pearce was a member of the New English Art Club and London Group. He lived in Upper Church Street, Chelsea where he assembled a wonderful collection including works by Vuillard, Bonnard, Gauguin, Grant, Sickert and others. The Tate archive holds his manuscript memoirs, which recall the London art scene from 1905 until the start of the First World War.