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The recent success of the book, Peter Clapham Sheppard: His Life and Work, followed by record-breaking prices for hitherto unknown masterworks, herald the rediscovered legacy of this forgotten early twentieth century Canadian modernist. And with it, a new chapter in our art history has begun which seeks to advance and further define Canadian art outside of the Group of Seven during this period of formation of our national school of painting and cultural identity.

Powerful works such as this one have not been seen in almost a century and their reappearance marks an exciting and fresh renewal of interest, for scholars and collectors alike, in Sheppard and other artists that deserve the recognition that eluded them.

Cab Stand, Montreal captures the quintessentially Canadian image of early village life and local economy: the central market. Unlike the unpopulated landscapes of his more famous peers, Sheppard’s foreground figures provide scale and humanity…an empathy that stemmed from a man whose father and relatives were brick makers in Toronto. Even the anthropomorphic horses feel the bone-chill of our snowy winters and momentarily rest from the daily burden of their labours. Sheppard was a master draughtsman and colourist as evidenced by the solidity of the figures and the bravura with which he applies the nuanced and saturated harmonies of related hues on the walls of the timeworn colonial architecture. There, the three rounded bay windows, bordered in a complimentary value of rich crimson, organize the composition into three separate groups and narratives. Furthermore, the horses and the men occupy three different depths of a shallow foreground, perpendicular to the flat wall, in a space of which the viewer is a part.

Cab Stand is a masterful painting of balanced colour harmonies with beautiful touches of complimentary notes in a composition equally balanced and stabilized by the interplay of verticals and horizontals.

Sheppard’s rich and rediscovered artistic output, still unexamined and undervalued at this point, offers us a keyhole to our past, richly preserving a collective memory that is crucial to our identity and culture. It is a rich and precious legacy, touching our lives with quiet consolation and beauty. Masterworks such as Cab Stand live on as images of captured moments forever frozen in time and, as with all great art and literature, are all we can ever know of immortality.

Louis Gagliardi

Curator, Peter Clapham Sheppard Collection

THESE ARE ARTLESS TIMES.

The world is suspended in the collective anxiety of a lethal global pandemic and all of us can now relate to what was once the neurotic’s private hell: the daily obsessive fear of the invisible and the surrender to time-consuming compulsive behaviours. Then there are the convulsions felt everywhere from a dying democracy to the south and an idiocracy that brings all of us and the planet closer to an existential event horizon. But there is an anodyne to all this and it resides in the core of our spirit, timeless, eternal, human. Wordsworth called it the longing for “something evermore about to be” and it has always defined us as a species in our bitter brief passage through time. It may be an anachronism to hold forth as a romantic in this blunt and brutal year of COVID, but I find comfort in a thing of beauty and this pursuit has been at the very foundation of my life. Art has always numbed the pain and lulled me into those beautiful intimations of the eternal, far from this vale of strife and the inexorable ticking of time.

For the last thirty years of my life I have curated the legacy and artwork of an extraordinarily talented Canadian artist, Peter Clapham Sheppard, RCA, OSA (1879–1965). Like many women and men in the early twentieth century who contributed to the culture and “rest in unvisited tombs,” his name and work were swallowed up by the forces that were constructing a national school of art limited to and defined by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. This personal quest to champion Sheppard and to restore his contributions to the culture has changed my life. It is purpose-driven and ideologically consonant with my sympathies for the marginalized and the forgotten. It is also a challenge to the next generation of Canadian art historians to expand our understanding of the past. A great country’s book of its art should not be as narrowly circumscribed as ours and future scholars must re-examine the legacy to give voice to the far-faint, those whose names and identities are grievously lost. It has been a journey of rapt discovery and new knowledge glutted with the joys of unexpected encounters such as the one I describe below.

An alert arrived on my phone weeks ago about a work by Sheppard to be sold at an auction in upstate New York. Having been intimate with the artist’s work for half my life now, from the animate pencil sketches to the magnificent canvases of urban scenes painted in Toronto, Montreal, and New York, I glanced only quickly at the portrait of a young man in three-quarter-length pose, to recognize it as an early work. The estimates seemed commensurate with the ignominy of its current condition, the market’s lack of familiarity with both the piece and the artist, and its unfortunate fate of having ended up in a storage unit for who knows how many years, no doubt crammed in with rude company among the last pieces of forsaken clutter from a long-forgotten estate. Who knows.

DAYS LATER, I lost in the bidding process and gave it no further thought until a week later when the phone rang. It was the auction house agent calling to tell me that the winning bid had fallen through and that the painting was mine if I wanted it. I sensed that this was yet another unmistakable line thrown to me by the universe as it has so often kindly done in my history with this collection. I took the line. This time I leaned in to take a closer look at the image on my screen.

I imagined that the stranger in the portrait now returned my gaze as though in a challenge, fixed with anticipation, through a gloom of darkened varnish and the buried memories of over a century of lost time.

In the research for my book, Peter Clapham Sheppard: His Life and Work (Firefly, 2018), authored by my brilliant friend Tom Smart, I located black-and-white photos in the City of Toronto Archives (Fonds 1244 Item 703k) featuring Sheppard as a young man in the painting studio at the Ontario College of Art, the Grange, from 1911. (One photograph was published in the Toronto Star Weekly but there were others from the same shoot.) While the women and men in the class are sitting around seemingly taking a break, the model, a grey-bearded man, busies himself by restringing the leather lacing of a snowshoe. Sheppard stands apart, older and more serious perhaps, engaged in his work on a large easel. It’s a bohemian-looking group with varied expressions and in candid postures, a tableau vivant from which we might imagine hearing the low unintelligible murmur of voices coming to a sudden halt for this instant commanded by the camera (figs. 2 & 3).

WILLIAM ALEXANDER DRAKE (1891–1979)

MY EYES SCANNED THIS PHOTOGRAPH on a hunch that I might find that face from the portrait. In an instant he jumped out in uncanny exactitude: the face, the stare, the three-quarter pose, the fully buttoned overcoat with the collar pulled up as in
a gesture of youthful panache, the shirt and tie underneath, and the palette resting on his left arm. When Sheppard painted his younger colleague around the time of this photo, he directed the subject’s gaze off into the distance, beyond us to our left, and posed the right arm, brush in hand, frozen in mid-stroke as though the young painter is momentarily interrupted from his work. The excitement generated by this identification was immediately compounded when I remembered that my copies of the archives folder also included a sheet of paper on which someone had traced caricatured heads from the photo underneath with corresponding names.* Perhaps this addition to the photograph had been provided by an alumnus, maybe one of the very individuals looking out from the photo across the divide of a hundred years. I’d found it, and in a moment of powerful joy pointed my finger directly at the name of William Drake (fig. 4).

In one stroke of happenstance, a mystery had been solved and the rudimentary outline of a story took shape.

I followed this up with a call to the auction house in upstate New York, from which I learned that the Sheppard canvas and a landscape painting by William Drake in the sale were both leftovers of what was once the latter’s estate. Then from a cursory search on my computer, I gleaned the following:

Born in Toronto in 1891, William Alexander Drake studied at the Technical High School on College Street under the tutelage of muralist and interior designer Gustav Hahn. From 1905, he was enrolled at the Central Ontario School of Art and Design (renamed Ontario College of Art in 1912), where he took classes intermittently until after
the First World War. He designed scenery at the Royal Alexandra Theatre and eventually left for the United States, where he was elected a member of the Architectural League, New York, in 1920. His previous experience secured him a teaching position in scenic painting at Yale’s Drama School. Finally, by retaining his membership at the Arts and Letters Club, Drake kept in contact with many of his friends in Toronto. A few postcards and other correspondence between Sheppard and him have survived.

CONSERVATION AND CONCLUSION

IT IS THROUGH THE ALCHEMY of conservation that I have experienced some of the most exhilarating outcomes in my thirty-year quest to salvage the artistic career of Peter Clapham Sheppard. The science has often allowed me to bear witness to the liberation of beautiful paintings from the dark and ponderous weight of old varnish, smoke, and neglect. When Portrait arrived, I immediately took it to the studio of a greatly talented conservator, George Nanowski, and entrusted it to him much like a fraught parent hands over a sick child to an emergency physician. Days later I returned to examine the canvas partially cleaned to see what it had to tell me
(fig. 5).

What followed was courtesy of Sheppard’s powers as an artist: I saw such immediate and palpable life, animated by fresh colour and the frozen motions of paint brushed across the canvas. I saw, half-revealed, the aspect of a young man with movie-star good looks, at once contemporary and timeless. Here was a living being, revived, with cheeks and ears flushed by the rosy warmth of a pulsing heart. Here was the affecting image of youth, proud and deathless, whose eye caught the light from an unknowable source outside the picture frame. That bright flash in his eye shone in boundless optimism but was made poignant by the retrospective knowledge that this very light, shared by a generation of young men in 1911, would be violently extinguished in the apocalypse of war just three years away.

If as Oscar Wilde quipped, “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist,” then what might we extrapolate about Peter Clapham Sheppard from this work? At thirty-two years of age compared to Drake’s nineteen, was he pondering his own fleeting youth? Or is it a declaration of the confident artist who is about to make his professional debut in the art world of Toronto? Sheppard could not have known it then, but it was this very portrait that would mark his first public appearance on the city’s art scene. On the back of this painting a yellowed and brittle exhibition label glued to the stretcher reads: Ontario Society Of Artists Annual Exhibition 1911, with the generic title Portrait, to which we may now ascribe a name and a life and an identity.

SHEPPARD NO DOUBT POSSESSED a formidable knowledge of the great art historical traditions of the Western world. It was shaped by his formal training and education as well as by extensive travel in Europe and the United States. This is further substantiated by the many illustrated art books he owned on the works of the Old Masters. Among them, pocket-sized monographs of Titian, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Van Dyck, and others have been preserved.

In form and character Portrait traces its artistic lineage to George Agnew Reid, Sheppard’s instructor, who had studied under Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy; Eakins had travelled to Spain as a young man only to fall under the spell of Velasquez. In Portrait, Sheppard cleverly channels and reworks the Grand Manner of portraiture to reflect his own immediate and personal world. In the place of subjects of wealth, power, and rank, he chooses friends and contemporaries, like William Drake, who lived lives “of useful toil ... and destin[ies] obscure.” In Sheppard’s treatment of this grand tradition, the usual symbols of bourgeois status are replaced by the painter’s smock, the polychromed palette, and the wet brush, which, in Drake’s right hand, is every bit as awesome as an aristocrat’s bejewelled walking stick. It is this empathy for everyday people, perhaps first recorded here in this portrait, that provides the thematic thread in Sheppard’s artistic output. It takes shape in the humanity of the workingmen populating such masterworks as The Bridge Builders, Construction, Bloor Street Viaduct, 1915; Morning on the River, 1917 (AGO); The Arrival of the Circus, 1919; The Tramp Steamer, 1921; Lower New York, 1922; and other extraordinary works yet unknown to the Canadian public.

Whatever the thoughts are that come from encountering this successful portrait of William Drake, it has already done for you and me what only art can do: confer upon our fragmented and fleeting lives a moment of higher consciousness that we can truly inhabit in response. Only art can revive a frozen moment in time that transports us from the tyranny of the temporal and banal toward those intimations of transcendence that are at the core of our humanity.

—Louis Gagliardi October 2020

*It was subsequently discovered that the cited material from the City of Toronto Archives came from none other than William Drake himself (Fonds 1225; William Drake Collection). In fact, a note on the webpage indicates that the image tracing was by the hand of Drake himself.

By Marc Montgomery | 
english@rcinet.ca
Posted: Saturday, August 31, 2019 00:34
Last Updated: Friday, September 6, 2019 14:21

Canada has produce a great many world class artists, but which have consistently been overlooked by critics. Only recently have some, such as Tom Thomson and the Group of 7 begun to be recognized internationally for their amazing talent.

Still that leaves many who are clearly world class, but relatively unknown outside a few limited Canadian arts experts

One such superb talent was that of Peter Clapham Sheppard.

A stunning new book chronicles and highlights the life and work of this incredibly talented artist. Tom Smart is the award-winning author of this and several other critical biographies, catalogues and books on Canadian artists.. Having worked in art galleries and museums across the country, he is currently the Director and CEO of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

This large coffee table style work published by Firefly Books is a celebration of rediscovery of an outstanding Canadian artist.

Not only was Sheppard (1882-1965)  an amazingly talented painter, but even more surprising that he is so little known is that he played a leading role in the creation of Canada’s national school of art.

A leading commercial illustrator, draughtsman, and lithographer his ability with exacting detail in such work is remarkably contrasted with his ability for interpretation of scenes in his prolific artwork.

Unlike many who developed a particular style, Sheppard’s work shows that he could master any style he chose, from portraits, to landscapes, to industrial subjects, oils, pencil, and watercolour.

A contemporary of the now world famous Group of 7 who are known for powerful interpretations of Canada’s wilderness and nature, a subject he himself was also drawn to producing his own superb works. However,  he was also fascinated with inner cities,  run-down old buildings surrounded by the vast skyscrapers thrusting up in the new cities around them.

He felt this was a rebirth amidst the destruction of the First World War, but tinged with the nostalgia for the past.

He also was captivated by ships and the busy city harbours of Toronto, Montreal and New York, major cities where he produced much of his work, again as a modernist looking toward the future. Yet his work also touches on the lives of the working class.

Incredibly this talented artist ended his life in poverty and has been largely forgotten.

Tom Smart hopes this over 200 page book with its multitude of wonderful colour reproductions of Sheppard’s artworks, and a detailed look into his life, will help restore the artist to his rightfully deserved place of recognition

The Globe and Mail - Nov 03 2018

Quill and Quire - Nov. 2018 Issue

Canada’s History - Dec. 2018 - Jan. 2019.

CanadianArt.ca - Dec. 03 2018

Peter Clapham Sheppard and the Group of Seven

His paintings are in the collections of Canada’s most respected galleries, but Peter Clapham Sheppard’s name remains unknown to most Canadians

His paintings are in the collections of Canada’s most respected galleries, but Peter Clapham Sheppard’s name remains unknown to most Canadians. A figurative artist and contemporary of the Group of Seven, Sheppard’s legacy as one of Canada’s finest 20th century painters has long been overlooked and overshadowed.

With the recent record-setting sale of a Sheppard painting and a new book, Peter Clapham Sheppard: His Life and Work, the artist’s legacy as one of Canada’s forgotten Masters is finally being recognized.

The following is an excerpt from Peter Clapham Sheppard: His Life and Work, available wherever art books are sold.

Peter Clapham Sheppard and the Group of Seven

Among the many circumstances that give a context for Sheppard’s life, the most important for him and for his cohort of artists working in Toronto particularly was the Group of Seven. The artists who formed and were members of this collective cast a very long shadow over the lives and art of their contemporaries in ways that were certainly not appreciated at the time of their emergence. An unknown consequence of their ascent and radiance in the cultural firmament of post–World War I Toronto is that, over the succeeding decades and into the new millennium, they made many of their contemporaries vanish from public consciousness. This was Sheppard’s unfortunate fate. Although he continued to paint in a style and mode that rivalled some of his peers’ in the group, for a complex set of reasons his light dimmed next to theirs, and his expressive skills and innovations were diminished and underappreciated.

Why did this occur? On the one hand it might well have been the result of being in or out of a club. A select group might have the patina of being open and democratic, but the truth is that a group by definition is exclusionary. Insiders were a phalanx that valued privileged inclusion, but were protective of their corporate status. You were let in to the company. You did not join it. The Group of Seven modelled itself as a band of like-minded individuals whose aims were to define a national school of art, and this academy was based almost exclusively on interpreting the landscape, urban and wilderness.

The institutional heft that the group received contributed to their ubiquitous presence in the cultural landscape of the third decade of the 20th century, and it is against this backdrop that Sheppard plied his trade. In retrospect, a key reason Sheppard was on the outside looking in at the group’s efforts is that his artistic intentions did not align with theirs. He did not seek out or describe nationalistic symbols or utopias in the northern landscape. His was a very different source of inspiration, articulated in a form of urban pastoral and in scenes of economic growth embodied in civil engineering projects and in the rail yards. Rather than identifying with the Group of Seven, Sheppard saw his art as better aligned with the two groups of contemporary American painters, the Eight and the Ashcan School . . .

Sheppard was primarily a figurative artist. While landscape did feature in his paintings of the late 1910s, it was treated more as a convenient means for developing painterly idioms independent of subject matter — as if the landscape merely served as a visual anchor for his forays into expressive experiments with colour. His wide brushstroke, his subtle use of close colour harmonies and complements betray an artist pushing convention and adapting the landscape subject, making it submit to the requirement of being a visual touchstone that supported an impulse to explore the purely expressive properties of colour.

YorkRegion.com - Nov. 16 2018

50 years after his death, a story of a Canadian artist, Peter Sheppard, is set to change Canada’s art history

Vaughan curator wants Peter Sheppard to be part of Canada’s art history

Nov 16, 2018 by Dina Al-Shibeeb  Vaughan Citizen

Louis Gagliardi of Vaughan is seen holding the newly published book detailing the life and work of Peter Clapham Sheppard (1879-1965). In the background, Sheppard’s "forgotten” paintings can be seen. - Steve Somerville/Metroland

In 1965, Peter Clapham Sheppard, a “master draughtsman, lithographer, and painter,” from Toronto died at the age of 86. Despite his gleaming talent, “he went to his grave, poor and forgotten.”

“Unlike his more famous contemporaries who turned to the mystic northern wilderness, remote and uninhabited, Sheppard’s modernist approach to his urban experience is always tenanted by humanity, often the working class,” says Louis Gagliardi, a retired educator from Vaughan endeavouring to bring renewed attention to this "great artist."

Dubbed as “radical” in his early career, Sheppard's inspiration extended beyond that of his Group of Seven contemporaries; instead, he looked to the New York painters of urban and industrial scenes.

But the stars are changing for Sheppard, well more than 50 years after his death, because of Gagliardi, a recently retired elementary school, who became obsessed with Sheppard’s “forgotten story.”

The 63-year-old art connoisseur, discovered the initial thread about Sheppard when he purchased a small oil sketch seen from a distance in 1987. “It just spoke to me as the saying goes."

But somehow, the painting led Gagliardi to the “Salvation Army Lodge and Bernice Fenwick Martin.”

Martin, Sheppard’s “last friend and support,” was the beneficiary of the late artist’s only remaining asset: his lifetime of work. 

In 1987, Martin’s life had gone “from riches to rags,” as she herself used to say.

“I began to regularly visit Bernice at the Salvation Army and soon the humanity of her story and condition cemented a friendship despite the 50 years that separated us in age,” he said.

Ever since the encounter, Gagliardi, who studied art history and criticism at the University of Western Ontario, has made it his personal quest to contribute Sheppard’s verse to the history of early 20th-century painting in Toronto.

“My 30-year curatorship of Sheppard’s art and his name runs parallel to my teaching career," Gagliardi said. “At the time these works were being salvaged, many of them had already suffered the distress of dirt, foul waters, and even bug infestations.”

But after all these years of work and more than 19 years after Martin’s death, Gagliardi is coming much closer to his goal: The inclusion of the “erased” Sheppard in Canada’s art history.

Gagliardi, a widower with two children, collaborated with Tom Smart, an award-winning author on Canadian artists and currently the executive director and CEO of the prestigious Beaverbrook Art Gallery, to publish Peter Clapham Sheppard, His Life and Work.

The book’s official launch was on Friday, Nov. 2 at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto.

“Sheppard is rich in another kind of history, that’s the history of the cities at the dawn of the 20th century,” Gagliardi said. “For example, his masterwork, which is on the cover of the book, depicts the Bloor Street Viaduct, a major landmark in the city built around 1915 to 1918."

The painting — The Bridge Builders, Construction, Bloor Street Viaduct — shows a group of labourers hard at work. It gives a window into Canada’s history and the changes happening at the time, he says.

“Tom Smart describes this work as a national monument. ... Why? It’s a window into the past,” Gagliardi added.

“While he painted (the piece) there's a war going on across the Atlantic and the Canadians have duly sacrificed in that war and they'll come out with a new sense of pride and national identity. ... What you see in that painting is the optimism, the hope that this century, the 20th Century, as (Wilfrid) Laurier, who was the prime minister at the time, said is the century that belongs to Canada."

Asked about the number of paintings he has of Sheppard, Gagliardi said he doesn't want to disclose that, nor their expected value, saying the "monetary value" is "irrelevant" at this point.

International exhibitions but no recognition

The “irony” is that Sheppard’s work in the formative decades of the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s was exhibited in “all the important shows along with all the famous works that we now know by the Group of Seven. He stood on equal ground with those artists and he showed in all those important exhibitions. But after they exhibited, (Sheppard's paintings) returned quietly to his studio,” lamented Gagliardi.

In 1925, Sheppard’s impressionist painting — Early Snow, Montreal — was shown in 1925 at the British Empire Exhibition held in Wembley, England, as well as in Paris in 1927, together with 215 Canadian works in a show organized by the Royal Canadian Academy.

“That was the first time Canadian art appeared internationally,” said Gagliardi.

“The dilemma is that this important historical collection has remained invisible, unknown, for the greater part of the century and cries out to be seen and properly exhibited,” he added.

To make that happen, Gagliardi has just engaged a doctoral student in art history to be the assistant curator of the collection.

“Her name is Natalie Hume, and I am excited about the research she is prepared to conduct  along with pursuing exhibition possibilities,” he said in hopes Canadians will rethink this period in art history.

“My purpose is not just to reveal Sheppard’s forgotten art but to make a clarion call for all the other women and men who were unfairly written out of our art history.  It is up to the next generation of Canadian art historians and I bid them Godspeed.”

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Editor’s note: A correction was made to this story on Nov. 9, 2018. Gagliardi is 63 and in 1987 he purchased a small oil sketch belonging to another artist. York Region Media regrets the error.

by Dina Al-Shibeeb

The Star - Jan. 07 2019

Is there a fortune in your attic?

I enjoy fine art – my grandfather was a landscape painter and his oil canvases hang on the walls of my house.

But I did not inherit his talent and have no expertise in the field, beyond knowing what I like and don’t like.

As a result, I have never invested in art and don’t pretend to know how to value a painting or a sculpture. I’m aware that some people have struck it rich with works they found in a corner of the attic (I watch “Antiques Roadshow” on occasion). But I’m not one of them.

In fact, I had never been to an art auction until recently. I’d seen them portrayed in movies (North by Northwest, The First Wives Club, etc.) but never actually attended one.

That changed when I was invited to an auction of Canadian fine art at Waddington’s in Toronto. The scene was almost exactly as I’d seen it on film – potential buyers equipped with numbered bidding paddles sipping on free coffee, a bank of desks where employees sat ready to accept phone bids from out-of-town buyers and a nattily-dressed auctioneer who stood behind a lectern on a raised dais where he could view the entire room and spot any bids.

The catalogue listed 138 items to be sold. I thought it was going to take all night. Nowhere near that! Thousands of dollars changed so quickly it was hard to keep up. Within three hours, 111 of the works had been sold for a total value of about $2.5 million.

Several paintings by Group of Seven artists went in minutes for what I thought to be bargain prices of under $20,000. Others by artists I was not familiar with were knocked down what seemed to be remarkably high levels.

For example, an oil by Peter Clapham Sheppard titled Elizabeth Street Toronto, which had been valued at between $40,000 and $60,000, went for an eye-popping $204,000 after some spirited bidding between two collectors in the room and a telephone buyer.

I had never heard of Sheppard, who did most of his work in the 1920s and 1930s, when he was overshadowed by the Group of Seven. He died in 1965, never having achieved wide recognition in his lifetime. It was only in recent years that collectors discovered him, and his reputation was enhanced by a book written by art historian Tom Smart titled Peter Clapham Sheppard: His Life and Work.

Another revelation was a painting by contemporary artist Ivan Kenneth Eyre titled Asessippi. It’s a landscape painted from memory of a river valley on the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border that was appraised at between $60,000 and $80,000. It sold for more than double the higher figure, at $192,000.

Both those paintings brought in more than the highest priced Group of Seven offering, an oil on panel work by Lawren Harris titled Watertower, Circa 1919. It went for $144,000, around the midpoint of its appraised value.

After reading this, you may want to take a closer look at what’s hanging on your walls or go rummaging through the attic or basement to see if there’s a small fortune hiding in your home. But what should you look for?

I spoke by phone with Stephen Ranger, Waddington’s vice-president fine arts. He said that most paintings don’t have commercial value, but about five per cent might be worth some money.

If you find something you think might fall into that group, look for a signature and, even better, a date. It’s usually found in the lower right-hand corner or on the back. “In fact, the back may reveal a lot about the painting and its history,” said Mr. Ranger. Besides a signature or date there may be gallery labels or other clues about previous owners and where it came from (its “provenance”).

Don’t remove a painting from its frame. It may be grimy and dusty, but an original frame may enhance the value.

Take a picture and send it to Waddington’s or some other reputable auction house for an evaluation (usually free). If you have several pieces, a representative of the company may arrange a visit to evaluate the whole collection.

Sellers pay the auction house a commission of 20 per cent on works that sell for under $10,000. The rate drops to as low as three to four per cent on more expensive items. Buyers pay a 20 per cent commission.

And what if you want to start collecting art yourself, in hopes of some windfall profits in future years? Mr. Ranger says to do some extensive research, attend auctions to see which artists are in demand and to buy the best works you can afford.

As for my grandfather’s paintings, they’re going to stay where they are. Even if they were worth thousands (they’re not), I wouldn’t part with them. They are all that’s left of him, and that makes them priceless!