Frederick Paul Gell collection for sale at UK auction

Frederick Paul Gell was born in Manchester on the 16^th February 1918.  His father, Charles, was a career military officer serving with the Mechanical Engineers and his mother being Evelyn Gell (nee Dewhurst).  The family was of Manx origins with grand-parents and earlier generations resident in the Isle of Man.

At the age of 16, he was mixing with artists like Lowry but any ideas of an artistic profession were placed firmly on the back burner whilst he worked as a traffic controller in the Royal Air Force.  Much to the disapproval of his family he enrolled as a mature student at the Academy of Bath and graduated in 1951.  In the ‘50s, he worked as part of a design team for Cunard being responsible for the interiors of cruise liners that became so popular after the Second World War.  Gell then immediately put his knowledge to use and became Assistant Art Director for the Midlands Area of the Arts Council.  After three years he moved to London and started painting in oils and acrylics and it was at this point in his life that interior design first prevailed.  He was entirely self taught but soon found himself on the register for the Council of Interior Design winning many contracts for ship interiors, and work for companies such as Heals.  A few commissions from his portfolio include a penthouse for Browns of Chester, The British Pavilions in Johannesburg and the British Stand at the International Fair in Stockholm which was commented on by the King of Sweden ‘...could not possibly have been designed by an Englishman’.

As an artist Gell originally worked in oils and acrylics painting many figurative subjects as well as landscapes.  In 1978 he moved from London to Plymouth and purchased Mount Stone House in the Stonehouse district of Plymouth.  The house, a former winter residence of the Edgcumbe family, apart from spectacular views over Plymouth Sound and the mouth of the Tamar, had a sheltered walled garden which fed his lifelong love of flowers.  The garden, was extremely varied divided into five areas, a vegetable and herb garden, a fruit garden, a formal garden and a bordered garden, alongside a wild garden.

At this point, after much experimenting he found that oils and acrylics were too rigid to portray the continuous movement and life force of his flowers, so he turned to watercolour.  Gell appreciated its qualities which enabled him to make shapes without abrupt edges or hard lines, allowing his subject also to melt into the space surrounding it.  An unusual attribute of Gell’s work was his directness of ideas onto paper, never creating preliminary drawings or working with any lines whatsoever.  This was to ensure fluidity and, when adopting his usual position of standing with the paper at table height, both his slick medium and dynamic style allowed his brush harmoniously to dance across the paper.  He was opposed to applying washes and working over them, he used to set down the essential shapes, a method highly unusual in orthodox European watercolour techniques and closer to the style of Chinese and Japanese artists’ work.  Gell’s work fused together the symbolic naturalistic and realist aspects attempting to suggest the infinite varieties of colours and forms found in wild life.  Gell’s work was unusually large in scale often measuring 1m each way and the result was a very imposing image, coupled with his use of bright colours, his art was a sure fire way to brighten the mood in any room.

In 1983 he wrote the book ‘Flowers from a Painter’s Garden’ – the Watercolours of Paul Gell. The commentaries of each of the 68 illustrations were by the artist, alongside botanical notes by Ronald King, Secretary of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew  (1959 – 1976),  the world’s foremost botanical research institution from 1959 to 1976.  The popularity of this book resulted in associated exhibitions, in London, Bath and New York with the Francis Kyle Gallery of London which were  huge successes.  Images produced as cards and prints resulted in extraordinary sales of over 2 million copies, mainly through Kew.

The artist moved to Ramsay, Isle of Man for the last years of his life, where he died on the 2^nd June 1996 aged 78 years. His work can be found on the walls of homes and institutions across the globe and his book ‘Flowers form a Painter’s Garden’ is a must for any keen botanical follower with an appreciation for art.

Lawrence Hendra & Graham Bazley

A selection of Frederick Gell's Paintings is beign auctioned at W H Lane on 25th February 2010

Click here to view the catalogue

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Piccadilly Gallery , London 1955

Shevioick Gallery, Cornwall 1975

‘Flowers in Watercolour’ 17th June – 12th July 1980

Francis Kyle Gallery, London

‘Four Seasons of Flowers in Watercolour’,  22nd – 25th May 1981

Bath Contemporary Arts Fair (Francis Kyle Gallery)

‘Four Seasons of Flowers in Watercolour’, 1st June – 26th June 1981

London, Francis Kyle Gallery

‘Watercolours’, 17th May – 17th June 1983

London, Francis Kyle Gallery

First New York Exhibition, 22nd September – 6th October 1983

Francis Kyle Gallery

‘Watercolours of English Flowers & Chinese Gardens’, 21nd May – 27th June 1985

London, Francis Kyle Gallery

‘In the Garden’, 6th July – 31st August 1985

Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery

Albermarle Gallery, 1988

London

Flower Paintings, 4th June – 16th July 1990

London, Kew Gardens Gallery