Fehr was born in
Forest Hill in south-east London into a Swiss family, who had settled in England. Fehr attended the
City of London School and is thought to have trained as an apprentice in the studio of the sculptor and stonemason Horace Montford, who supported his application to the
Royal Academy Schools in 1885. Although Fehr won several prizes at the Academy, he was narrowly beaten to the 1889 gold medal in sculpture and a travelling scholarship by his fellow student
Goscombe John. Fehr was greatly upset, and protested repeatedly, when the Tate moved the sculpture from an internal gallery to the position outside the building where it remains.
J.S Gibson & Partners commissioned Fehr for decorative works on several buildings including the West Ham Technical Institute in London, for a school in Scarborough, for
Walsall Central Library and, most notably, for the
Middlesex Guildhall in
Parliament Square. For the same company, Fehr made a coloured plaster relief frieze of scenes from the
Wars of the Roses for the interior of
Wakefield County Hall in 1898. In October 1919, as
World War I was drawing to a close, the
Royal Academy in London held an exhibition of war memorial designs. At the exhibition Fehr displayed statuettes of three figures,
Peace holding a dove, a winged
Victory and
Saint George with a sword and shield. Several other memorials, including those at
Lockerbie and
Langholm in Scotland, at Eastbourne and at
Grangetown in Cardiff, only featured the figure of
Victory, holding a laurel wreath and an inverted sword, on a pedestal or obelisk. The memorial on
the Bund in
Shanghai (destroyed on the orders of the Japanese army in 1943) featured
Peace guarding a mother and child. Fehr first exhibited at the
Royal Academy in 1887. ==Public works==