Edward Francis Wells

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.