Mary Fedden

The White Umbrella

1995

Mary Fedden was a Modern British painter, printmaker and illustrator. Born in Bristol to a family of surgeons, from childhood Fedden had wanted to become a painter. At the age of sixteen Fedden left Badminton School to study at the Slade School of Art, London, where she stayed for four years. She studied under the designer Vladimir Polunin who had previously worked with the Ballets Russes. She was employed by Sadlers Wells Theatre to create sets but decided to return to Bristol soon after. Here she taught and painted portraits, before serving in the Land Army and Women's Voluntary Service during the Second World War. She was called up in 1944 and was sent abroad to work as a driver for the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (NAAFI). Fedden settled back in London after the war, where she worked for the Arts Theatre in Great Newport Street as a stage painter whilst also producing propaganda murals. Fedden decided against a career of stage design and in 1946 was able to resume easel painting and her first solo exhibition followed the next year at the Mansard Gallery in Heal's Department Store, where several of her still life flower paintings were displayed. 'Woman' magazine commissioned her to paint covers shortly after, and at the end of the 1940s, she moved to a complex of studios, Durham Wharf, on the Thames at Chiswick, where she lived and worked until her death. Fedden married the artist Julian Trevelyan in 1951, having met before the war, and they travelled to Europe, Africa, India, Russia and America together. Since then she has continued painting, and the Redfern Gallery, New Grafton Gallery and many others throughout the country exhibit her work. In 1951 she painted murals for the Festival of Britain Television pavilion and later began teaching painting at the Royal College of Art. She was elected to the Royal Academy in 1992 and since the mid-1930s has been a member of the Royal West of England Academy at Bristol, where she was president between 1984 and 1988. Fedden's work is in the collection of Yale Centre for British Art (Pritzker Gift). A monograph on Fedden was published in 2014 by Lund Humphries and written by Christopher Andreae.