Sherril Schell - Gifted Gallery

Sherril V. Schell, born 1877, was an American architectural and portrait photographer active in London during the earliest decades of the twentieth century. He was one of the photographers from the American modernist avant-garde.

Born in Iowa in 1877, his father from New York and his mother from Wisconsin. He had a studio in London in the early 1900s to the 1910s and it was here that he gained renown for his pictorial portraits.

Amongst the subjects he photographed he is best known for his photographs of Rupert Brooke. It was Francis Meynell, the son of the poet Alice Meynell, who suggested to Schell that he photograph 'the beautiful Rupert Brooke'. Schell was amused at the idea that any man should be 'beautiful', 'visualising in spite of myself a sort of male Gladys Cooper or a Lady Diana Manners in tweed cap and plus fours'. But he found Brooke 'a genial, wholesome fellow entirely unspoiled by all the adoration and admiration he had received … in short a type of all round fellow that only England seems to produce'.

In the spring of 1913 Schell was living in a flat in St George's Square, Pimlico, and there in the living room, on a foggy day and without any artificial light, he photographed Brooke, who came to him dressed in a suit of homespun, with a blue shirt and blue necktie. The tie was a curious affair, a long piece of silk wide enough for a muffler, tied like the ordinary four-in-hand. On any other person this costume would have seemed somewhat outré, but in spite of its carefully studied effect it gave him no touch of eccentricity …. His face was more remarkable for its expression and colouring than for its modelling. His complexion was not the ordinary pink and white ... but ruddy and tanned. His hair, a golden brown with sprinklings of red. … The lines of his face were not faultless … he had narrowly escaped being snubnosed.

In all Schell took some dozen exposures of Brooke that day (each demanding 'one whole minute without the least change of expression').

In the 1920s Schell moved to New York and married Blanche Bonestell, sister of artist and designer Chesley Bonestell. It was here in New York that became passionate about photographing skyscrapers, which was constantly under construction.

He was most likely influenced in that by his brother-in-law, the painter and designer Chesley Bonestell, who was tasked by the architect William van Alen with the outside decoration of the Chrysler Building, where he notably went on to create the celebrated eagle-shaped gargoyles.

Chrysler Building by Schell

Chrysler Building by Schell

Chrysler Building by Schell

Schell quickly became one of the leading artists of the Julien Levy Gallery. His work was displayed at all the major founding exhibitions of Modernism, including Photography organised in 1930 by the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art and Photographs of New York by New York Photographers, which was held at the Julien Levy Gallery, June 1932. In June 1929, he had four of his photographs on the front page of the New York Times.

Sherril Schell died in 1964. From 12 April to 13 June 2006 an exhibition entitled Sherril Schell: Unknown Modernist featured fifteen rarely displayed photographs from the Museum of the City of New York's permanent collection by this pioneering but long-overlooked modern master. "Like some contemporaneous European photographers, Schell (1877-1964) saw beyond photography’s documentary function, employing unconventional perspectives to create striking compositions, often with strong diagonal elements, that stressed the abstract qualities of the city’s built environment."

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