By Dave Gudgeon

Last updated 12:38, Friday, 28 November 2008

Carlisle's Tullie House museum and art gallery has acquired a work by the celebrated Cumbrian artist Sheila Fell – paying £20,000 at auction.

Autumn Cumberland (farm towards dusk 1958)

The oil painting entitled Autumn Cumberland (farm towards dusk 1958) was bought last week.

The purchase was made possible thanks to financial assistance from the Friends of Tullie House and an anonymous benefactor.

Sheila Fell, who was born in Aspatria and trained at the Carlisle College of Art, is regarded as one of the most important British painters of the mid-20th century.

Tullie House now owns five of her works and has 12 more on loan. All of those paintings will be the subject of an exhibition planned for 2010.

Melanie Gardner, keeper of fine & decorative arts at Tullie House, said: “This acquisition adds significantly to the already substantial and increasingly celebrated art collections that we have here.”

At 4ft by 3ft in size, the painting is an imposing and arresting work – a brooding foreground of a farmstead or village at dusk contrasts with the horizon and sky.

It is treated in an unusual and dramatic way, adding to the symbolic content of the image.

The painting, which has appeared in London exhibitions staged by the Beaux Arts Gallery and the Arts Council, is to be fully conserved and re-framed before it appears on show.

It was purchased at the Carlisle auction of Thomson Roddick & Medcalf and is probably the last of family-owned works by Fell to become available.

Sheila Fell, who died in 1979 at the age of just 48 after falling down a staircase, went on to the St Martin’s School of Art in London after her spell in Carlisle.

She is the only Cumbrian Royal Academician of the last century, and one of the relatively few women artists to be so honoured.