Dominic Fine Art

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Dominic Fine Art

Dealing in Forgotten Masters and Overlooked Talent. Plymouth, by appointment. Scholarship is also on the move.

It is perhaps tempting to believe that the significant works of art have all been found; that the inventories of our national museums are already set-in-stone. Yet each year, these institutions make great efforts to acquire new works for their collections. Botticelli, El Greco and Vermeer were all forgotten masters, before catching the attention of influential critics and collectors. Few artists

can expect a similar revival, but I believe the long road from ‘forgotten master’ to ‘museum acquisition’ is best begun in small, practical steps. Most of us recognise a good picture when we see it in a museum or a gallery, but how will it appear when it surfaces in an unlikely place? Small details such as framing, lighting, conservation and photography can all combine to make masterpieces look ordinary; they can also mask the contributions of interesting and worthy artists. Whilst conservation might rejuvenate the paintings themselves, research can repair the reputations behind them, revealing that forgotten artists were once highly-rated and close to the leading figures of their time. I believe that artistic decline can be accidental, that talent is not always aligned with the right temperament, and that there may simply be more geniuses than we can recognise.

14/07/2026

There was a time when dealers wrote to museum curators for help on difficult paintings. I am told that some of them even replied. But this hasn’t been the case for many years and a few bloody-minded individuals now write to museum curators to help them with their own collections. These emails are not always well received.
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The following portrait of the unknown woman is in the collection of and was included in their 2011 exhibition on William Etty. A grand affair accompanied by a large catalogue, with seven different authors. It had a page to itself. Etty was born in York and the gallery rightly see themselves as the custodians of his legacy. The painting has the address of Soyer’s cousin in Brussels on the reverse. Shortly before dying in childbirth in 1842, Soyer’s husband and stepfather travelled to Brussels with a sample of her paintings to show to the Belgian King.

24/06/2026

In art history, the difference between very stupid and very clever is often very small. And I suspect this will be well demonstrated in our lecture at the tomorrow morning. It has been a pleasure to work with .busiakiewicz on Emma Soyer (1809-1842) and to see his methods up close. Reassembling her scattered output would have been impossible without him.

19/01/2026

August Podesta’s view of Briesnitz (1833) shows a churchyard abandoned and overcome with weeds. You can see Dresden in the distance, one of the main centres of the German Romantic Movement. It was a popular subject with the painters congregating around Caspar David Friedrich in his final years.
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Podesta would never reach this level again. It is difficult to earn a living painting in such detail. He has hidden his signature on one of the gravestones – spectacular pessimism for a painter of 19 or 20.
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15/01/2026

Just a week until the opening of the , where I will be exhibiting. If you happen to be in New York, in easy distance of the Park Avenue Armoury, it would be good to see you.
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The organisers and Helen Allen have recreated the study of a young collector, who appears to have good taste. I’m happy to be a part of it.
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“Study of a Young Collector” (Stand A14) - 23rd January – February 1st

17/10/2025

Over the past year I have chased Emma Soyer (1809-1842) through archives and auction records, and have found many of her paintings hiding among the works of other painters. Perhaps soon we will have enough of them for an exhibition. For the time being they will go towards a catalogue. You can see 2 of them on Pall Mall, at least for the next day or so.

15/10/2025

Following the death of her parents, Ernestine Mills came under the guardianship of Hertha and William Ayrton. Hertha Ayrton had just isolated a persistent flaw in arc lighting and was the first woman to deliver a paper at the Royal Society in 1902. She met Marie Curie in London a year later. Curie signed Ayrton’s petition on female suffrage, Ayrton gave a maths lesson to Curie’s daughter Irène.
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Inspired by scientists on one side and pre-Raphaelites on the other, it was perhaps inevitable that Mills would turn to enamelling, which offered some possibility of reconciling the persisting tensions between scientific method and faith.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ For the use of a firing kiln is itself an act of faith. But perhaps in the variable hues of fused glass, the pigments of increasing brilliance and variety (virtue of modern chemists), she saw a way of escaping the deflating division of labour that separated artists from artisans, designers from technicians.
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14/10/2025

“Possible Worlds” – Ernestine Mills (1871-1959)
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This large enamel share a title with a book of essays published in 1927 and predates the Equal Franchise Act of 1928. It was a culminating event in the life of Ernestine Mills (1871-1959), a prominent suffragette who designed the “votes for women” badge in 1907.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ In her younger years she had been a student of Frederic Shields, himself a friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She was also related to Georgiana Burne Jones and her parents befriended Simeon Solomon in 1866, allowing him to recuperate in their family home after his conviction of 1873.
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13/10/2025

Good paintings. Comfortable benches.

08/10/2025

As a young man, John Bulloch Souter (1890-1972) evaded the copyist’s fee in the Prado (1 peseta) by sketching areas of a composition, but never the entirety. He exhibited this one at the Royal Academy in 1925, shortly before he married the sitter and before his spectacular fall from grace. In 1926 his painting “The Breakdown” was removed after just 9 days on display. It depicted a black saxophonist playing to naked white dancer. A large statue of Euterpe, looking suspiciously like that of “Britannia” has fallen to the ground.
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He never attempted anything as adventurous again and it is some reflection of his decline as well as the difficult life of a portraitist that he chose to paint-over his magnum opus and reuse the large canvas. Something he would later regret, when his wife persuaded him to paint a smaller version in 1962. The following painting is therefore a rare insight into his best years.

02/10/2025

I will be exhibiting at between 13th and 17th October.
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Something of a personal ambition, stretching back to an episode of Fake or Fortune with a Constable sketch. I forget the details, though by the end of the episode I had decided I would quite like to be an art dealer.
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In early 2019 I turned up at the gallery for the first time, unannounced, just before closing time, claiming to have found a portrait of the Duke of Wellington by Sir Thomas Lawrence. I’d made at least 2 laps of St James’s before feeling able to ring the doorbell. They were too polite to tell me to leave.
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Mould & Company have consistently raised the status of overlooked artists and I am proud to be exhibiting my paintings there. They have also brought the mysteries of the art market to a wider audience, even to an antique shop in Plymouth. I am grateful for that.

Address

27 New Street, The Barbican
Plymouth
PL12NB

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+447969074879

Website

http://dominicfineart.com/

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