Edward Ladell – Still life with fruit

Edward Ladell was born in Colchester on the 12^th of April 1821. He was entirely self-taught, having initially pursued a career as a coachbuilder. He travelled a lot, moving from Colchester to Torquay and later to Exeter where he took a studio at 20 Queen’s Street. During this time, he exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1856 and 1886, as well at the British Institute, the Royal Society of British Artists, Suffolk Street and local West Country venues. It was as though he became an overnight sensation in the 1850s and further displayed his excellence really cementing him as a crucial force in the art world. Ladell became immensely successful and known as one of the finest English still life painter of his generation.

Ladell specialised in still life’s composed of fruit, flowers and a variety of objects including glass, tankards, China vases and bird’s nests. His technique achieved an astonishing degree of realism. All these motifs and techniques made his paintings easily recognisable such as the use of the same articles repeatedly on a marble ledge draped with an oriental rug. His biographer Frank Lewis writes: ‘he paints with the fidelity of an old Dutchman and with the brilliancy of colour all his own. A dead duck lying upon a board, as represented by Mr. Ladell, is a duck indeed…maybe it’s a branch from a raspberry bush laid carefully down, and while the fruit is round and luscious, over-ripe or scarcely ripe, the leaves whether fresh or fading, are represented with a verisimilitude that is marvellous.’

Ladell married a fellow artist in 1878. Ellen Maria Ladell, neé Levitt was a painter who worked from 1856 to 1898. She painted in a style similar to Ladells. In 1886 Ladell died in Exeter. Edward Ladell’s obituary in The Essex County Standard considered him ‘the foremost man of his day in fruit painting’.

You can find Ladells work today represented in the Bristol City Art Gallery, the Colchester and Essex Museum, the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Essex, the Harrogate City Art Gallery, the Reading City Art Gallery and the Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield.