Last year I spotted several interesting canvases in a charity-shop window on my way to work in Deal. The paintings were varied but good and I took what I considered the best ones, before returning about fifteen minutes later for the rest.
That they were all gone in that that time didn't surprise me but what regrets I had were reconciled in part by two oils with Royal College of Art stamps that dated from a golden period of British art & design, the early 1950s. Held in simple wood frames, the pieces consisted of a still-life study of a ram's skull on a chair and a grand drawing-room scene with such commercial appeal it sold within a few hours in my own gallery, Fleming's on Broad Street.
To my surprise the skull hung around for months. The painting had both a primitive and modernist quality that to me recalled the early work of Francis Bacon. Its browns, blues and greys blunted a little by years of dirt and dust retained a potency too that put in mind of both the abstract art movement of the era, as well as the emerging commercial design seen in jazz record-sleeves and film posters of the period.
Painted in the year of the Festival of Britain, the picture came from a precise place and a time, 1951. The artist however was largely unknown, her name was Rozanne Palmer.
I discovered little trace of her on the internet but learnt she had lived in Middle Street for many years and was something of a recluse. A neighbour of Rozanne told me a developer had bought her cottage when she'd died and had all the contents cleared. The paintings I found were the work of young woman, nineteen perhaps or twenty. A talented art student, ground-breaking even by her sex who perhaps went on to embark on different voyage entirely. After all, I did a foundation at Camberwell and look what happened to me.
For a few weeks it amused me to listen to the thoughts of various experts and customers. Much older men than myself couldn't quite decide whether they're wives would like it, or doubted its quality as the artist was unknown to them. During this period, I was lucky to acquire an Allen Jones signed lithograph and a rare piece by Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller. Like Rozanne Palmer's paintings, the work was not prohibitively priced, indeed it was what I hear the chattering-classes cry most for, 'affordable modern art.'
By chance I ran into the television art-expert Philip Mould one Saturday evening who kindly agreed to come to my shop Fleming's the next day, but it was who he had come to see in Deal at The Astor Theatre that made a remarkable breakthrough. Peter Cocks, whose late-father had studied at the Royal College at the same time, placed Palmer's wooden chair in a painting by Rodrigo Moynihan, showing the doyens of the RCA teaching staff in a group portrait, including John Minton, Ruskin Spear and Moynihan himself who was professor of painting at the College. The work was specially commissioned for the Festival of Britain and now hangs at the Tate.
In Deal's conservation area that encompasses Palmer's old home on Middle Street and a myriad of side roads, I spoke to an old resident who is now selling up because she's fed up with having no neighbours. In the last few years, she told me that many of the properties have been bought up by London investors who rent them out as holiday-homes. The area, famously saved from demolition by Noel Coward in the 1960s is perhaps now being socially demolished in another way, its character and history ripped out by by people I assume know the price of everything but the value of nothing at all.
Driving from Kingsdown to work last week over the August Bank holiday, I spotted the other Palmer painting in the window of an antique shop in Walmer and out of personal curiousity Googled her name once again. To some surprise, I found that a friend's auction house in Folkestone that specialises in British art and jewellery had sold several works of hers in May. The paintings he told me came by way of a house clearance in Deal.
As it happened, I sold the chair and skull study to a young man on Middle Street who had just returned from Glastonbury and was glad to tell him, that in its way, the painting was going home. Yesterday, I got in touch with the man who did Rozanne Palmer's house clearance and have discovered he still has lots of her work. She hadn't stopped painting, she never did and was a member of the RA. I am now proud to announce that his work by a famous Deal artist will soon go on show to the public at Fleming's.
That they were all gone in that that time didn't surprise me but what regrets I had were reconciled in part by two oils with Royal College of Art stamps that dated from a golden period of British art & design, the early 1950s. Held in simple wood frames, the pieces consisted of a still-life study of a ram's skull on a chair and a grand drawing-room scene with such commercial appeal it sold within a few hours in my own gallery, Fleming's on Broad Street.
To my surprise the skull hung around for months. The painting had both a primitive and modernist quality that to me recalled the early work of Francis Bacon. Its browns, blues and greys blunted a little by years of dirt and dust retained a potency too that put in mind of both the abstract art movement of the era, as well as the emerging commercial design seen in jazz record-sleeves and film posters of the period.
Painted in the year of the Festival of Britain, the picture came from a precise place and a time, 1951. The artist however was largely unknown, her name was Rozanne Palmer.
I discovered little trace of her on the internet but learnt she had lived in Middle Street for many years and was something of a recluse. A neighbour of Rozanne told me a developer had bought her cottage when she'd died and had all the contents cleared. The paintings I found were the work of young woman, nineteen perhaps or twenty. A talented art student, ground-breaking even by her sex who perhaps went on to embark on different voyage entirely. After all, I did a foundation at Camberwell and look what happened to me.
For a few weeks it amused me to listen to the thoughts of various experts and customers. Much older men than myself couldn't quite decide whether they're wives would like it, or doubted its quality as the artist was unknown to them. During this period, I was lucky to acquire an Allen Jones signed lithograph and a rare piece by Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller. Like Rozanne Palmer's paintings, the work was not prohibitively priced, indeed it was what I hear the chattering-classes cry most for, 'affordable modern art.'
By chance I ran into the television art-expert Philip Mould one Saturday evening who kindly agreed to come to my shop Fleming's the next day, but it was who he had come to see in Deal at The Astor Theatre that made a remarkable breakthrough. Peter Cocks, whose late-father had studied at the Royal College at the same time, placed Palmer's wooden chair in a painting by Rodrigo Moynihan, showing the doyens of the RCA teaching staff in a group portrait, including John Minton, Ruskin Spear and Moynihan himself who was professor of painting at the College. The work was specially commissioned for the Festival of Britain and now hangs at the Tate.
In Deal's conservation area that encompasses Palmer's old home on Middle Street and a myriad of side roads, I spoke to an old resident who is now selling up because she's fed up with having no neighbours. In the last few years, she told me that many of the properties have been bought up by London investors who rent them out as holiday-homes. The area, famously saved from demolition by Noel Coward in the 1960s is perhaps now being socially demolished in another way, its character and history ripped out by by people I assume know the price of everything but the value of nothing at all.
Driving from Kingsdown to work last week over the August Bank holiday, I spotted the other Palmer painting in the window of an antique shop in Walmer and out of personal curiousity Googled her name once again. To some surprise, I found that a friend's auction house in Folkestone that specialises in British art and jewellery had sold several works of hers in May. The paintings he told me came by way of a house clearance in Deal.
As it happened, I sold the chair and skull study to a young man on Middle Street who had just returned from Glastonbury and was glad to tell him, that in its way, the painting was going home. Yesterday, I got in touch with the man who did Rozanne Palmer's house clearance and have discovered he still has lots of her work. She hadn't stopped painting, she never did and was a member of the RA. I am now proud to announce that his work by a famous Deal artist will soon go on show to the public at Fleming's.
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