Mary Fedden valuation
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.
What a work by Mary Fedden is worth
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 is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
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.
Murals, galleries and labels
Fedden painted murals for the Festival of Britain in 1951, the P&O liner Canberra in 1961 and, with Julian Trevelyan, Charing Cross Hospital in 1980. She had a one-person show somewhere in Britain every year from 1947 until her death in 2012, including the Redfern Gallery from 1953, the New Grafton Gallery from the 1960s and the Beaux Arts Gallery in the 1990s, and the Royal West of England Academy gave her a major exhibition in 1996.
Because the pictures were sold through so many galleries over so long, a gallery label on the back is often the most useful piece of provenance a work has, and it should be kept with it.
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.
