Sculptor born in London on 1 July 1915, the daughter of Winifred Gordon Bell, an animal painter and art teacher. She entered Regent Street Polytechnic at the age of fifteen and studied sculpture under Harold Brownsword, Marjorie Crossley and Geoffrey Hampton Deeley. In 1935, she exhibited at the Royal Academy for the first time, aged 19 (modifying her surname to the more distinctive, hyphenated ‘Gordon-Bell’). Her work, a relief entitled The Ride of the Valkyries, presumably had some significance for her as she showed it again in Glasgow’s 1938 Empire Exhibition. During the second half of the 1930s she was a regular contributor to both the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy but her marriage to Grasmere-based landscape painter, William Heaton Cooper, in 1940 and her subsequent duties as the mother of four children meant that she exhibited nothing more until 1955, when she and her husband, working from their studio, the Heaton Cooper Studio in Grasmere, had a joint exhibition at the Fine Art Society Galleries in Bond Street, London. Her exhibits included portrait heads of the New Zealand mountaineer, Sir Edmund Hillary, whom she had met at an Everest reunion at the Eskdale Outward Bound centre, and Lord John Hunt, the leader of the 1953 Everest ascent. (The original plaster model for the Hillary head is in the Heaton Cooper Studio and a bronze cast is in the Te Papa Museum in Wellington, New Zealand.) In 1957 Bell made one final appearance at the Royal Academy with a portrait head in bronze, ‘Elisabeth, daughter of Arthur and Cynthia Goodland’, and a relief in anhydrite, ‘Agnus Dei’. Her biggest patron was the Atomic Energy Authority, who commissioned several major pieces from her: for their headquarters at Risley, Birchwood Park, Lancashire, low relief panels demonstrating the production of nuclear power (c.1956) and Thought and Action, two colossal figures in Portland stone (1957–58), and for their site at Winfrith, Dorset, Merchild and Dolphin. A committed Christian, Bell received several commissions from religious foundations, including a statue of the Venerable Bede in Roman stone for St Bede’s Catholic Church, Carlisle, Cumbria (1959), and a Madonna and Child for the Convent of St Denys, Warminster, Wiltshire (1973; version in plaster and fibreglass resin in St Oswald’s Church, Grasmere). A member of the Lake Artists Society since 1940, in her later years she made popular editions of sculptures dealing with local subjects: shepherds, farmers and climbers, some with dogs or sheep, and a series of three celebrating the Wordsworth family: a bust of William Wordsworth as a young man; a two-figure group of William with his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth; and one entitled Poem, representing a young couple listening to Richard Curwen Wordsworth reading one of his ancestor’s poems. An exhibition of Bell’s work, ‘A Vital Spirit’, was held at the Heaton Cooper Studio, May–October 2015. The Lake Artists Society continues to grant an annual ‘Ophelia Gordon Bell Award’, aimed at encouraging and rewarding excellence and innovation in sculpture.
Bibliography: D.A. Cross, Public Sculpture of Lancashire and Cumbria, Liverpool, 2017, p. 155; D.A. Cross, ‘Ophelia Gordon Bell’, Cumbrian Lives website; Heaton Cooper Studio website: ‘Ophelia Gordon Bell 1915–1975’; Mapping Sculpture; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, pp. 7–8; Wayback Machine (Internet Archive): ‘Heaton Cooper Studio – Biography of Ophelia Gordon Bell’; Wikipedia: ‘Ophelia Gordon Bell’.
Terry Cavanagh, December 2025