What is it worth?

It really is hard in the extreme to answer a question like this - out of the blue and out of context. Was there a market for your father's work when he was active? I'm assuming there isn't one now, or you would know about it .... no gallery showing his work, no collector currently interested. This makes it enormously hard to know what to suggest. I suppose the commercially intelligent thing to do would be a) to establish a market - and here, you need cooperation from someone to spread his fame: a gallery; an enthusiast; a magazine; better still a newspaper - have you thought of writing to art critics?; b) to release these paintings slowly - a flooded market won't yield as much as one which is hungry for more. Beyond that, and although I'm open to contradiction (and rarely disappointed), I doubt that anyone here could go.

I would first contact local auctioneers and valuers and see if they like the paintings. If they do, you could ask for a valuation of one of them, but there would a fee to pay. Another way is to persuade the local newspaper to publish an article about your father, his life and his work. It's a human interest story that might be appealing to readers. It would give you some publicity. http://www.richmondandtwickenhamtimes.co.uk/news/

I think in your place I would persist with the college and newspaper connections - it depends on how urgent the problem is: you're having to pay for storage, which I know is expensive. Syd's suggestion will probably help you clear a fair amount of the work away and thus make it unnecessary to keep paying to store them; but the downside of that of course is that your father's work is not widely known - so while you might get more than the auctioneer's estimate, I have a feeling you'd be lucky if you did. It depends entirely on who attends the auction - if there's an art collector or gallery with a keen eye, you might do well. If there isn't, you could be faced with having to sell paintings for £30 for which you might have got £300 if a market had been established. I think I'd rather give the paintings away to people I knew would appreciate them than that - don't forget, if you accept low prices you devalue the work and any sum it might fetch later: in the long run the work might gain in value, but then as someone once said, in the long run we're all dead... I do know of an approximately parallel case: a gentleman I knew slightly left a large quantity of framed watercolours when he died. They came into the possession of someone else I knew, who asked me to look at them and suggest a value - in short, we had the same problem; except that in this case, the artist was an enthusiastic amateur, not a professional painter. The pictures were attractive but once you'd said that you'd said everything: so I was able to suggest £30 to £50 each, and that was more or less what they fetched at a series of car boot sales ..... the vendor released the pictures over a period of time, creating a local appetite for them and ended up doing quite well financially. But of course this did absolutely nothing at all for the reputation of the artist - it just sold twenty to thirty paintings and resolved a storage problem. This isn't the case with your father's paintings. He was a professional, his work - you haven't yet got the landscapes up on the website, I think? - is probably not to the current fashion, but fashions change, and tastes can be educated and made. This would be the better course for you, if you can do it - to promote the work on the basis of its quality, its relevance to the times in which it was created and to the institutions with which your father was connected. If you have the time to do that, and can get a little help, it's the route I would recommend. Your father's work deserves more than the local auction house/car-boot sale/Ebay method - that would solve your storage problem perhaps, but I think you want rather more than that. I know I would. So keep on with the good job you're doing with the website - get more of the work on there, the links to other sites are interesting but it's the paintings people are going to want and need to see so prioritize those, and keep in touch with your connections at the college and elsewhere, because they could provide the answer. I'm sure all of us here wish you success with this - do keep us informed.

Robert, Elaine, Robert...... Otherwise, many thanks and happy new year to you too. (I'm not offended, mind - someone on Facebook called me Grandpa; unfriended now, obviously.... and that's only because I couldn't shoot him.)

I'd keep on publicising the availability of the paintings, stressing their link with Twickenham and the surrounding districts. Where I live we get a few monthly free magazines with adverts, and one of the better ones has articles on items of local interest. I imagine there will be something similar in Twickenham, which might provide free publicity. It's an affluent area, and there may be potential buyers. I would then put one or two pictures for sale in an auction house and see what prices they achieve. Depending on the results you could take a gamble, hire a church hall for a weekend and display all the paintings you have,

I had trouble with one image refusing to download, but that might be down to all sorts of problems which have nothing to do with the website. Apart from that, the site works well and you've done a good job on it. You can have a go at mine if you like! I still haven't sorted out a pixellation problem on the gallery page, to the extent I'm contemplating removing that page altogether. The difficulty I think you're going to have with the paintings is that quite a few of them could be said to be of their time - this isn't a criticism, of course, but there are fashions in painting; you may find establishing a market for them slow going - but then, most things that are worth doing take time to come to fruition.

Just to add to that - I think the most interesting works are the still lifes - interesting in the sense of being commercially attractive; much attracted to the Hibiscus painting, and one (forgotten the title already: this happens so often now!) of, I think, fuchsias; although botany not being my strong point, it might have been something else. The dancers, too - these form quite a series, and I would have thought if you could just find the person to whom they appeal, they might snap up the lot. Portraits of other people do not, I'm told, sell well - unless you're after a mythical collection of ancestors to populate your stately home when you've struck it rich..... There's no personal connection, that's the trouble ... the exhibition painting is striking, though ... if the people in it were relatives of mine, I'd certainly be interested in it. The Mayor portrait is sold, I see - to the council he headed? And the abstract of the Limes - one of the most appealing paintings on the site, I think; well - it appeals to me, anyway, and obviously did to someone else. Much to look at, anyway; I'm sure there's potential here if you can just get the wave going - ie, stimulate interest and demand; you're doing all the right things, so one can only wish you luck (the vital missing ingredient in many of our endeavours...).