Sheila Fell R.A. (British, 1931-1979) Sorting Potatoes, Yorkshire I signed 'FELL' (lower right) oil on canvas 50.8 x 60.5 cm. (20 x 23 3/4 in.) Footnotes: Provenance The Artist Acquired by the family of the present owner from the 1976 exhibition Private Collection, U.K. Exhibited London, The Royal Academy of Arts, Summer Exhibition, 8 May-1 August 1976, cat.no.341 Literature Professor J. Andrew Bradley and Dr Eleanor Bradley, Sheila Fell: Catalogue Raisonné, Lund Humphries, London, 2025, p.383, cat.no.391 (ill.b&w) Sorting Potatoes, Yorkshire I belongs to the mature period of Sheila Fell's career, when the themes that had occupied her since childhood were expressed with increasing confidence and intensity. By the mid-1970s, Fell had achieved considerable recognition, being elected a Royal Academician in 1974, yet her attention remained firmly drawn to the landscapes of northern England. Although Cumberland was the great subject of her career, she also painted further afield, bringing the distinctive visual language she had developed there to other agricultural landscapes. At the heart of the present work is the physical labour of sorting potatoes. Fell was fascinated by what she called the 'people of landscape', considering those who worked the land to be as integral to her subject as the fields themselves. In 1961 she wrote that 'all the landscape is lived in, modulated worked on and used by man', a belief particularly evident here (Sheila Fell, 'Notes', The Painter and Sculptor, vol.4, no.2, Summer 1961). The workers are not simply placed within the landscape but become part of its rhythm, their activity linking the dark earth with the broader sweep of the countryside. This was far removed from an idealised vision of rural life. Fell painted the countryside as she knew it: worked, weathered and inhabited. In Sorting Potatoes, Yorkshire I, the physicality of the subject is echoed in her vigorous handling of paint. Heavy impasto and broad, expressive brushstrokes give the surface a tactile quality, while the simplified figures and earthy forms seem to emerge from the landscape itself. The distinction between people and their surroundings is deliberately softened, creating a sense of shared physicality between the workers and the land. Fell's paintings were rooted in observation, but they were never simply descriptive. She made extensive field sketches during her visits to the north, which she would take back to her small London flat and develop into independent compositions. Working from these sketches, memory and experience, she transformed familiar subjects into paintings of considerable emotional force. Her distance from the landscape perhaps allowed her to distil rather than simply record what she had seen. Sorting Potatoes, Yorkshire I demonstrates Fell's ability to find poetry in the ordinary rhythms of agricultural life. Through the weight and texture of her paint, the workers, earth and sky are brought together into a single, powerful image: a landscape shaped by human hands, yet always subject to the forces of nature. We are grateful to Professor J. Andrew Bradley for his assistance in cataloguing this lot. This lot is subject to the following lot symbols: AR AR Goods subject to Artists Resale Right Additional Premium. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing