MARY FEDDEN. FRUIT IN THE SUNSET

Size: 16″ x 20″ / 40.5cm x 50.8cm (including frame the size is 20″ x 24″ / 50.8cm x 61.0cm)

Signed and dated: Fedden ’01

Framing: Mary Fedden’s original wooden moulding frame with gilded slip

Provenance: From a large private collection, London

MARY FEDDEN. FRUIT IN THE SUNSET.

Mary Fedden was a British artist whose finely executed paintings often took the form of a hybrid between a still life of everyday objects (usually in the foreground) and a landscape (used as the backdrop). As in this painting, she would typically position a group of objects such as fruit, bottles and cats depicted in fine detail in front of a striking background scene. Over the years she became best known for such bold, vivid still lifes and her colourful views. This large oil painting, Fruit in the Sunset, is a fine example of such works, with the backdrop in this case being a rural landscape bathed in a stunning red sunset. In the foreground we have a quintessential Fedden still life of a table with stripped cloth embellished with some of her very favourite objects including her saki bottle, a dry corn cob, a large bowl of fruit containing grapes and I think persimmon, plus a lemon and melon.

In his book Mary Fedden Enigmas and Variations, Christopher Andreae writes about her landscape paintings: “Mary Fedden’s compositional balancing of solid and space, air and object, allows for a rich play of colour, but her colour too is ordered and balanced. She often says how much she dislikes too many colours in a painting. She prefers one dominant colour – red, blue, black or grey – like a key in a piece of music. Everything else must harmonise with this dominant colour, which is a kind of surround. But then some small part of the painting might punctuate this main colour with a vivid contrasting hue.”

MARY FEDDEN. FRUIT IN THE SUNSET. Available for sale – please contact us for further details.