Mary Fedden

Mary Fedden, born Adye Mary Fedden, was born on 14 August 1915 in Bristol, England. She attended Badminton School in Bristol before studying at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1932 to 1936, where she trained under the theatre designer Vladimir Polunin.

She began exhibiting solo annually from 1947, starting at the Mansard Gallery at Heal's in London, and continued at the Redfern Gallery in London from 1953. In 1951 she married the artist Julian Trevelyan, and the couple lived and worked together at Durham Wharf in Chiswick, London. Sources give differing years for when she became the first woman tutor of painting at the Royal College of Art, with some citing 1956 and others 1958; she taught there for roughly six years, and her students included David Hockney and Allen Jones.

Fedden served as president of the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol from 1984 to 1988, and the Academy mounted a major exhibition of her work in 1988. She was elected a Royal Academician in 1992 and was appointed OBE in 1997. She is also reported to have received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bath in 1996 and an honorary degree from Durham University in 2009, though these two honors could not be independently corroborated in the available research. She continued to paint into her nineties, with a large retrospective of 125 works at Portland Gallery, London, in 2008, reported at the time as one of her most significant shows to date. Mary Fedden died on 22 June 2012 in London, at the age of 96.

Fedden's critical reputation rests on a body of still-life and landscape painting that writers have consistently linked to French modernism while insisting on its English character. Writing in his 1995 study of the artist, the critic Mel Gooding described her work as reflecting a deep, generous attention to the everyday objects she painted, a reading later echoed by Christopher Andreae in his 2007 book Mary Fedden: Enigma and Variations, which emphasized her persistence and disregard for changing tastes as she continued painting into old age. Her long institutional career, from the first female painting tutorship at the Royal College of Art to the presidency of the Royal West of England Academy and election to the Royal Academy, has reinforced a critical view of her as a central, if quietly influential, figure in twentieth-century British painting.

Fedden's auction market is broad and long-running rather than headline-driven, with regular sales at UK regional and London auction houses. The current highest documented price is USD 71,000, paid for Still Life with Oval Window (1974) at Bonhams, London, on 26 March 2025; the exact GBP hammer price for that lot was not independently confirmed in the available sources, though it is well above other verified results. Those include GBP 23,750, paid for The Fish Pot at Chiswick Auctions, London, on 29 March 2022, and GBP 17,000, paid for Near Lucignano at Rogers Jones & Co in a 2026 sale whose exact date could not be confirmed in the available sources.

Fedden's market is wide rather than deep: her paintings and works on paper appear regularly at UK auction houses, mostly in the low thousands to low tens of thousands of pounds, with occasional stronger results such as Still Life with Oval Window (2025) and The Fish Pot (2022). There is no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance and attribution should be checked against Portland Gallery, which represents her estate, and against the extensive public collection record at institutions such as Tate and the Royal Academy. Because reported currencies and premiums are not always consistent across sale reports, collectors comparing prices across different auction houses and years should confirm whether figures are hammer or all-in and in which currency.