Campbell Archibald Mellon

(1876 - 1955)

Gorleston Sands

Signed, lower right: C. A. Mellon
Oil on canvas
20 x 24 in – 50.8 x 61 cm
Frame size
26¼ x 30¼ in – 66.7 x 76.8 cm

Tel.: +44 (0)20 7839 7693

Provenance

Frost & Reed, London, no.29900, titled Gorleston Sands, Morning; Private collection, UK; MacConnal-Mason Gallery, London; Private collection, UK

Biography

Campbell Mellon was born in Berkshire, 16th June 1876. It was not until his move to Nottingham in 1903 that he turned to painting, studying under Carl Brenner, a nephew of the landscape painter Benjamin Williams Leader (1831-1923), who lived in Nottingham and exhibited at the Royal Academy. Mellon served in The Great War, retiring to Gorleston in Norfolk in the years following. It was here in Norfolk that he turned to painting as a career, studying with Sir John Alfred Arnesley Brown RA (1866-1955). Arnesley Brown, coincidentally born in Nottingham, having lived and painted in Cornwall and London, settled in Norfolk in the village of Haddiscoe near Gorleston. He was a landscape painter whose works were evocative of the East Anglian landscape with its towering skies. Mellon inherited a certain similarity of brushwork and this interest in the East Anglian atmospheric conditions, many of his coastal scenes are inscribed with dates and times. It is for his coastal scenes, sun-drenched sands with figures picked out in impasto and fluid brushstrokes, that Mellon is best known, although he also painted landscapes, tranquil contemplative scenes of the marshes and broads and villages in East Anglia.

He exhibited at the Royal Academy 1924-1955, Norfolk and Suffolk scenes, excepting the war years when he moved to Hereford. Mellon was elected to the Royal Institute of Painters in Oil in 1938, and to the Royal Society of British Artists in 1939 and exhibited widely; he was Chairman of the Great Yarmouth Art Society. Following his death in Gorleston 28th August 1955, a memorial exhibition was held at the Norwich Castle Museum in February 1956.

His works can be found in museums in: Bristol; Great Yarmouth; Leeds and Sheffield.

Campbell Archibald Mellon