Edward Ladell

Edward Ladell, “Still Life with Prawns and a Delft Pot”, c 1880, Oil on Canvas, 30.5 x 26 cm

Edward Ladell was a British painter known for his still-life paintings of flowers, fruit, and glass vessels, done in the style of seventeenth-century Dutch traditions. 

Born in April of 1821 in Hasketon, United Kingdom, Edward Ladell  spent his early years working at his father’s coach building business. He married Juliana Roope in July, 1848, and moved to the East Hill neighborhood of Colchester, with a daughter being born in 1860.  It is thought that he may have been apprenticed as a pattern designer of a Flemish textile company in Colchester, a business central to the city’s economy since the seventeenth century. 

Despite the lack of information on his art training, it is evident Edward Ladell was deeply familiar with the still-life paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Dutch and Flemish schools, either through museums or private collections. He successfully submitted an oil painting entitled “Study from Nature” to the Royal  Academy exhibition in London in 1856. Ladell again exhibited his work three years later, at the annual exhibition, and established his career as a painter.

Throughout the first half of the 1860s, Edward Ladell painted his characteristic still-lifes, always with meticulous attention to detail and realism. By 1865, he stopped submitting works to the Royal Academy; listed as single on the 1871 census, it is suspected that serious illness or accident took the life of Ladell’s wife and daughter.  It was not until 1868 that Ladell began to exhibit paintings again. 

During the 1860s, Ladell, with an acknowledged reputation as a still-life artist, accepted a small number of private students. One of his students was Ellen Maria Levett, who most likely joined his studio class in the mid- 1870s. Ellen became his wife in October of 1878, after which they made their home in the city of Exeter, where Ellen gave birth to a son in 1880. 

His domestic life settled, Ladell continued to expand his clientele through both regional exhibitions and the annual shows at the Royal Academy, the British Institute and the Suffolk Street Galleries in London. It was at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1880 that Ladell presented his “Still Life with Prawns and a Delft Pot”, which attracted attention from a number of critics who admired it for its realism and success at expressing shades and reflections. 

Between 1880 and 1886, Edward Ladell became a highly regarded member of the Exeter community. He died after a brief respiratory illness on November 9, 1886, at the age of sixty-five, and is buried in the Higher Cemetery behind St. Mark’s Church in Exeter. Today, Edward Ladell’s  works are held in the collections of the Museum of Croydon in London, the Royal Albert Museum in Exeter, the Reading Museum in Berkshire, and the Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate, United Kingdom.