Paul Feiler (30 April 1918 – 8 July 2013) was a German-born artist who was a prominent member of the St Ives School of art: he has pictures hanging in major art galleries across the world.
Paul Feiler was born in 1918 in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany into a cultivated family of lawyers, doctors and liberal politicians; his father was a professor of dentistry. He was educated in Zwolle in the Netherlands and then at Canford School in Dorset, England.
His parents in 1936 moved to London: his father established himself as a dentist in Harley Street. Paul studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London 1936-1939 with artists such as Patrick Heron, Bryan Wynter and Kenneth Armitage. As an enemy alien in 1939, although thoroughly anglicised, he was interned on the Isle of Man and then in Canada. On his return to England in 1941, he was an arts teacher at Eastbourne College, which had been evacuated to Radley College in Oxford.
After World War II, he taught art at the West of England College of Art in Bristol: he became the head of painting there in 1960. In 1975 he moved to the disused chapel in Kerris near Newlyn in Cornwall where he would live until his death.
Feiler’s first solo exhibition was a sell-out at the Redfern Gallery in London in 1953. He had four more exhibitions there in the 1950s.