The artist was born in Worcester and trained there and in Birmingham. He specialised in depictions of country life and his drawings of young girls are delightfully and minutely observed.

Arnold Fellows was a pupil at Queen Mary’s Grammar School, Walsall, between 1911 and 1917. He became a master of the school for a brief period, before moving to spend the remainder of his life as a teacher at Chigwell School in Essex. Fellows devoted much of his life to collecting art, notably works on paper, and eventually donated his entire collection to his old school. He was the author of The wayfarer's companion: England's history in her buildings and countryside, published by Oxford University Press, 1937.