Mary Fedden
Still lifes with a jug, a fruit and a cat, set against a view — and painted for seventy years.
Mary Fedden was born in Bristol in 1915 and trained at the Slade under Vladimir Polunin, who taught theatre design, which shows in the flatness and the staging of her pictures. She drove lorries and painted murals during the war, taught at the Royal College — the first woman to teach painting there — and lived and worked for decades with her husband Julian Trevelyan at Durham Wharf on the Thames. The pictures are consistent to the point of being a signature in themselves: a still life of a jug, a bowl, a piece of fruit and often a cat or a bird, placed on a table against a landscape or a window. She was elected President of the Royal West of England Academy and died in 2012.
A long life and a steady output mean a great many works, and they are almost all unique: oils, and a very large number of gouaches and watercolours, which come to market constantly. Because the pictures are small and were widely bought, provenance is often domestic rather than documented, and the signature — a small Fedden, usually with the year — is doing a lot of the identification. Signed limited-edition prints were published and are a separate and much larger category. Works on paper carry the usual light and foxing questions.
If you own a work by Mary Fedden
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.