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Mary Fedden, born in Bristol in 1915, quietly shaped the story of 20th-century British art. After training at the Slade School of Fine Art, she developed a style that seemed both structured and slightly offbeat, which is exactly what made it so distinctive. Her career spanned decades, and so did her influence, especially through her teaching roles at the Royal College of Art, where her students included David Hockney.

Fedden painted right up until her final years, never straying far from her preferred subjects: still life, seaside scenes, and those famously expressive cats. As a female British artist working in what was still very much a male-dominated art world, she carved out a reputation that felt entirely her own. Collectors still seek out Mary Fedden paintings for their mix of wit, elegance, and emotional accessibility; a balance not easily found.

She married fellow artist Julian Trevelyan in 1951, and the two shared a Thames-side studio at Durham Wharf for decades. Fedden was elected President of the Royal West of England Academy between 1984 and 1988, and later became a Royal Academian on 27th May 1992. She continued painting well into her nineties and sadly passed away in 2012, aged 96.

Edwin La Dell ARA (1914-1970)

Born in Rotherham, Yorkshire, he attended Sheffield School of Art. In 1935 he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art under John Nash. He later became head of the Department of Lithography at the College from 1948 until his death.

La Dell was appointed as an official war artist during the Second World War, working on both public murals and camouflage,[1] but his best known works are those from the post-war era, in particular the lithographs he created for the coronation of HM The Queen, for the School Prints scheme and for Lyons Tea Rooms.

His work is currently held in many collections, including those of the Royal Academy, the Government Art Collection and the V & A.

Alan Munro Reynolds (1926-2014)

For ten years, from 1948 to 1958, Alan Reynolds was supremely successful as a Neo-Romantic landscape painter. He then turned to abstraction and, in 1967, abandoned painting in favour of constructions. For the last 30 years, he has made only white reliefs, tonal drawings and woodcuts.

Alan Reynolds was in Newmarket, Suffolk, on 27 April 1926, the son of a stableman in racing stables. Le��aving school at the age of fourteen, he worked in various jobs while teaching himself to paint. Then, following the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined the army.

He served with both the Suffolk Regiment and the Highland Light Infantry, in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. His time in the army provided a grounding for his subsequent career, for he took teachers’ training courses to become an education sergeant, and spent his leave absorbing the paintings and theories of Paul Klee and the artists of Der Blaue Reiter.

Following demobilisation, Reynolds studied at Woolwich Polytechnic School of Art (1948-52) and at the Royal College of Art (1952-53), where he received a medal for painting. He began exhibiting with the London Group in 1950, while still a student, and two years later held the first of many solo shows at the Redfern Gallery. He has also exhibited abroad in New York, Paris, Pittsburgh, Zurich and at various venues in Germany. He taught drawing at the Central School of Art (1954-61) and then painting at St Martin’s School of Art (from 1961). Becoming Senior Lecturer in Painting in 1985, he retired a decade later.

Initially, Reynolds worked as a landscape painter in oil and watercolour in a Neo-Romantic manner, evolving recognisable, often small scale, natural forms into expressive patterns. Then, during the late 1950s, he turned unequivocally towards abstraction, by emphasising the geometric, rather than organic, qualities of networks of horizontal and vertical lines. A decade later, he began to produce painted wooden reliefs, and these were surveyed, alongside his drawings, in 1991, at a retrospective at the Annely Juda Gallery. Latterly, he lived and worked in Kent.

His work is represented in many public collections, including the Tate and the V&A.

Further reading
Michael Harrison, Alan Reynolds. The Making of a Concretist Artist, Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2011

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William Dring, RA, RWA (1904-1990)

Pastel on paper

William Dring was a skilled technician, who produced realistic, restrained and smoothly executed images – both as a painter in oil and watercolour, and as a draughtsman, particularly in pastel. While he developed a strong reputation as a sympathetic portraitist – with sitters ranging from family members to the Prince of Wales –
he essayed a range of subjects, including landscape and still life.

William Dring, known familiarly as John, was born at 33 Kingscourt Road, Streatham, London, on 26 January 1904, the eldest child of William Henry Dring, a compositor for a daily newspaper, and his wife, Ellen (née Croft). His younger brother, James, would also became an artist.

Following schooling in Streatham, Dring studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, between 1922 and 1925, under Henry Tonks. While there, he won several prizes and scholarships – including those for decorative painting and figure drawing – and emerged as a fine draughtsman and painter. His fellow student, Grace Elizabeth Rothwell, known as ‘Gray’, would become his wife.

Following their marriage in 1931, William and Gray Dring moved to Hampshire and, by 1935, had settled at Kenelm’s Cottage, Shawford, south of Winchester. Together they would have one son and two daughters, including Elizabeth, who also became an artist. He taught at Southampton School of Art (and possibly the Southern College of Art, Portsmouth). During the decade, he not only established himself as a portraitist and genre artist in pastels and oils, but was also inspired by the Hampshire countryside to paint landscapes in watercolour. The success of these led to his election as an Associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1942. (He would become a full member in 1957.)

Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Dring began to receive commissions from the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. Then, in early 1942, he was appointed an Official War Artist to the Admiralty. He travelled extensively across Britain, producing pastel portraits in Portsmouth, Scotland and the Western Approaches. In late summer 1943, he received a second full-time contract that included more general subjects. His third and final contract, in 1944, led him to produce portraits for the Air Ministry.

By the end of the war, Dring and his family had moved to Windy Ridge, Compton, west of Shawford (and this would remain his home for the rest of his life). Having been elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1944, he soon became a noted exhibitor at the RA, and also took up a position as an assistant teacher at the Royal Academy Schools, where he gained a reputation for exacting standards. A decade later, in 1955, he was elected a full Royal Academician. He also exhibited with leading London dealers, especially Agnews.

Increasingly, Dring focussed on his work as a portraitist, and received many commissions for official portraits – including Sir Oliver Franks in 1962 and the Prince of Wales in 1973 – as well as depicting royal occasions.

Agnews mounted a major retrospective of Dring’s work in 1990. However, he was unable to attend due to illness, and died later the same year, on 27 September.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Imperial War Museums and the National Maritime Museum.

Biddy PICARD (1922-2019)
Grey Harbour (2000)

Acrylic on board, signed, titled to Stour Gallery label verso, 29cm x 33.5cm, framed 46cm x 49.5cm.

Born in 1922 in Derbyshire, Biddy Picard attended Chesterfield School of Art before training at the Slade. After a period of teaching art in Bristol she moved to Wales and then in 1974, to Cornwall.Biddy has remained a long term member of the Newlyn Society of Artists and has also taught both painting and ceramics at the Penzance School of Art.

One of the woodcutters who came first to the lamorna valley, biddy and her husband Bill Picard were at the centre of the artistic circles of mousehole and newlyn. In later years they established the mousehole pottery and gift shop. Biddy Picard’s work has been exhibited regularly at galleries throughout Cornwall and also in the Midlands, the North of England and London.

Her paintings are widely collected and included in many private collections in both the United Kingdom and Europe. “I try in my painting to convey some of the particular magic of West Penwith; the feeling of remoteness, the intensity of light and the rapid changes of mood. Thrusting into a restless sea, it is an “end place” where little harbours cling to the stern granite rocks, for me a special land unlike any other”.

Ben Nicholson (1894–1982)

Collotype, published by Pallas Gallery, 1960.

Accompanied by the artist Christopher Wood, Nicholson visited St Ives, Cornwall for the first time in August 1928, where they discovered the painter Alfred Wallis who would become an important influence on them both. In 1931 he met the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, and within a year began sharing a studio with her in Hampstead. Together they held a joint exhibition at Tooth’s Gallery, London in 1932.

Nicholson would go on to marry Hepworth after his divorce from Winifred Nicholson was finalised in 1938. In 1939 Nicholson and Hepworth relocated with the triplets (born in 1934) to Cornwall where he resumed painting landscapes and coloured abstract reliefs. His international reputation grew during the 1950s as a result of a series of large still lifes for which he received several important prizes. In 1954 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale (alongside Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon) and was awarded the Ullisse prize. The following year the Tate Gallery held the first of two retrospectives of his work, the second being shown in 1969.

His time in Tuscany around 1957-1960 is widely regarded as one of the most serene and visually refined periods of his career. These works often depicts doors, church facades, towers and arches in Tuscany and Umbria.

Gertrude HARVEY (1889-1966)
Oil on board, signed, 32 x 39cm, 48 x 55cm framed.

Gertrude Harvey was a painter and regular artists' model. She lived in Penzance, where she met and married the landscape painter, Harold Harvey, in 1911. After marrying, the couple settled in a cottage in Newlyn, Cornwall, with a studio nearby. They lived here throughout the First World War. Harold and Gertrude were close friends with many of the second generation artists, including Dod and Ernest Procter and Laura and Harold Knight.
This oil is in wonderfully original condition. It has been varnished, but there is no suggestion that it has ever been restored or even cleaned. In fact, a light cleaning may brighten the colours. The frame is likely to be the original and is wholly sympathetic with the work. Some shrinkage cracks can be seen at the mitres.

Adrian Paul Allinson, RBA ROI LG PS (1890-1959)

One of the hugely talented generation of artists to emerge just before the First World War, Adrian Allinson managed to hold his own through both his personality and his work. He became best known as a painter of strongly modelled, appealingly stylised landscapes, figure compositions and flowers. However, his manifold talents encompassed set design, sculpture and pastels of which this picture is a fine example.

Painted in 1974, Elephant by Roger Hilton is a vivid and highly expressive example of the artist’s late burst of artistic creativity. Executed with sweeping gestural brushwork and animated by bold passages of red, ochre and blue against a deep grey form, the composition transforms the circus elephant into a playful semi abstract presence.

Provenance: Waddington Gallery

Inspired by the light, atmosphere and artistic heritage of Cornwall’s most celebrated beach, Porthmeor by Tom Leaper is a beautifully balanced contemporary work that captures the rhythm and energy of his native county. Drawing on both landscape tradition and contemporary abstraction, Porthmeor offers a sophisticated and evocative presence.

A striking fusion of contemporary sculpture and paper art, this original origami crow by Tom Leaper captures the intelligence, mystery and sharp elegance of one of nature’s most symbolic birds. The bronze is expertly folded by hand into a three dimensional form, capturing the character of the bird which is both playful and sophisticated.