DIMENSIONS: (unframed) 19.75 x 19.75 ins
50.17 x 50.17cms
SIGNATURE: Signed and dated lower left
MEDIUM: Oil on canvas
Still Life with Pear, Melon and Grapes is a painting by British artist Mary Fedden. Born in 1915, Fedden had a lifelong passion for art and left school at the age of sixteen to study at the Slade School of Art under the theatre designer Vladimir Polunin. Following her tutor’s lead, Fedden went on to work as a set painter at Sadler’s Wells and the Arts Theatre in Great Newport Street in London.
This painting reveals Fedden’s career-long preoccupation with still life painting; a genre that she described as her ‘real love’. While the subject may be a traditional one, with a well established place in art history, Fedden rejected the classical origins of the genre with its symbolic significance and realistic representations; instead, Fedden followed the example of earlier Modernists such as Pablo Picasso and Paul Cezanne who strove to break its formal stereotypes, reducing the subjects to their basic forms. Fedden always denied the symbolic significance of the objects in her still life paintings, instead seeing them simply as items that she enjoyed painting.