Edward Francis Wells was a painter of pastoral scenes and portraits. He trained at the Royal Academy Schools and painted in a traditional ‘old master’ style. He exhibited at the Royal Academy summer exhibition and at smaller commercial galleries in London and elsewhere. The artist signed his work E. F. Wells.
A Dorset upbringing
Edward Francis Wells was born in Chinsurah, India, on 3 April 1876. His father, William Howley Wells (known as Howley), worked in the Indian Civil Service as an engineer, and his mother was Annie Maria Wells (née Ring). Edward had a younger sister, Maud, but two older siblings had died of cholera, and it was health concerns that led the family to move back to England in 1879. Shortly after the family’s return to England and through fellow old Etonian Henry Fox-Strangways (who was now the 5th Earl of Ilchester), Howley Wells was offered the stewardship of Fox-Strangways’s estate at Melbury Park, Dorset. The family moved into a tied property at Evershot on the edge of the estate, where his parents were to live for the next thirty years.
An art education
At the age of nine Edward was sent to a preparatory school at Bournemouth and two years later progressed to Clifton College, a private boarding school in Bristol, where he met Frank Moss Bennett (1874–1952), who was to become a lifelong friend and a popular artist. In the early 1890s Wells expressed his ambition to be an artist, and his family encouraged him by adapting a milking parlour into a studio.
Wells and Bennett both first attended the Slade School of Art and then briefly attended St John's Wood Art School before almost four years at the Royal Academy Schools (from February 1896). In his first year at the Royal Academy Schools, Wells won the Creswick Award for best landscape painting with A Farm on the Hill – a picture that was selected for the Royal Academy's summer exhibition the following year.
In March 1900 Wells and Bennett travelled to Italy, visiting Florence, Siena, Rome, Naples, Capri and Venice. They returned to England in 1901, and formally left the Royal Academy Schools in January of that year.
Patronage and a one-man show
Keen to establish himself as a professional artist, Wells rented a studio in Chelsea – considered London’s art centre – and in February 1902 he joined the Chelsea Arts Club. Under the patronage of two of the younger members of the Fox-Strangways family, a large exhibition of Wells’s watercolour sketches took place in Dorchester; works included were Italian pastoral scenes, Dorset scenes and also some pastel portraiture. Wells’s father had strong views on art and favoured the ‘old masters’. He was somewhat obsessed by technique and by a pseudo-scientific pursuit of objective reality through the ‘true’ rendering of colour and tone. In this respect he seems to have been influential on Edward’s evolving style of picture-making. Howley was also Edward’s financial backer. The father and son’s preference for the training he received at the Royal Academy Schools over the Slade School of Art also indicates their conservative view of art. Wells’s work always demonstrated a desire for technical exactitude, and he undoubtedly had a particular facility to create a good ‘likeness’ in portraiture.
The Wells family’s social connections to the landed gentry and its ‘old-boy network’ placed Edward in a good position to set up himself up primarily as a portrait painter. Initially he often worked in pastels – which let him work quickly, often requiring only one sitting. Selections of these pastel portraits were exhibited at the Carlton Gallery London in 1904.
Courting
Throughout this period Edward had been courting Anne Helen Pellew, the daughter of an Indian Civil Service judge. Like Edward, although born in India, she had grown up in England. Her family had a Clifton address, and it seems likely that the two became acquainted when Wells was at school there. She was musical, poetic, ‘very delicate’, and came to ‘adore’ Edward, who apparently ‘ministered to her every need’.
Anne frequently stayed at Wimbledon, in south London, where her mother owned a property. When she could escape her six siblings, Anne and Edward enjoyed London life, attending concerts, exhibitions and the theatre, and liking to eat at fashionable ‘bohemian’ restaurants on the Fulham Road, near Edward’s studio. This was the era of Edwardian country-house parties, and weekends were often spent at the homes of family friends and sometimes gatherings at Evershot. A portrait of ‘Annie’ was selected for the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1905.