Biography
Carl Felkel (b.1896) was an Austrian painter who, in the late 1930s, following the Anchluss (the annexation of Austria by the Nazi Germany), settled in London where he eventually enjoyed a long career as a painter of landscapes and society portraits. He is perhaps best remembered for the vibrant and immediate pictures he made of places such as Capri, Southern France, Paris and Sicily to which he travelled regularly and painted en plein air.
His work is represented in many UK public collections including the Derby Museum and Art Gallery, the Manchester Art Gallery and the Royal Collection, London
More about Carl Felkel
Born just north of Vienna, in Stockerau, Felkel studied initially in Munich, under Walter Thor, and subsequently at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1918), under Hans Tichy, becoming a master student under Professor Rudolf Bacher. Whilst still a student he established a love of travelling, and he explored Europe extensively, painting local landscapes in watercolour and oil.
After fleeing to London, Felkel exhibited at the Goupil Gallery and became a member of the Free German League of Culture. However, further to the introduction of internment for so-called ‘enemy aliens’ in June 1940, Felkel was among many German-speaking artists interned at Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man, where he was among the 14 signatories (also including Hermann Fechenbach, Erich Kahn, Fritz Kraemer, Herbert Mankiewicz, Hermann Roessler, Kurt Schwitters, Fred Solomonski, Erich E. Stern, Fred Uhlman and Hellmuth Weissenborn), who wrote to Sir Kenneth Clark, director of The National Gallery, protesting that ‘Visual Art cannot lived behind Barbed Wire’ and appealing for release; published in the New Statesman on 28 June 1940.
After his release, Felkel established a home at 174 Holland Park, London. He resumed the travels around Europe that he began as a young man. His work was popular and he exhibited widely on the continent; back in London he showed work at The Royal Academy and cemented a reputation for powerful landscapes in oil and watercolour, whilst also enjoying significant success as a society portraitist and book illustrator.
He died in Holland Park in 1980.