There is something particularly satisfying about discovering an artist whose work has largely escaped the attention of the wider art market.
Rosemary Eva Broom is one of those artists.
We have been fortunate enough to acquire a substantial collection of her paintings, ranging from her early art college years through to works produced much later in her life.
And what a lovely collection it is.
There are bold, colourful compositions, heavily textured landscapes and paintings that reveal an artist who clearly enjoyed the physical business of putting paint onto a surface.
Her name may not be particularly familiar, but her work is well worth getting to know.
From Campbeltown to Edinburgh
Rosemary Eva Broom was born on 26 March 1932 in Campbeltown, Argyll, to Tom Forrest Broom and Margaret Grey Johnston.
She had an older brother, Ronald Broom (1929–2018), who pursued a career in scientific research, working in Zurich, Switzerland, and later becoming a research fellow at the University of Cambridge.
We know relatively little about Rosemary's early childhood, but her artistic education eventually took her to Glasgow and Edinburgh.
According to the Irish edition of Burke's Peerage, she studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow before attending Edinburgh College of Art.
It is an interesting educational journey, taking her from the performing arts environment of Glasgow to one of Scotland's most important art schools.
We are fortunate to have several paintings from her art college years in the gallery.
These early works are particularly interesting because they allow us to see something of her artistic development before the paintings for which she would later become known.
They also provide a tangible connection to a period when Edinburgh College of Art was home to an extraordinary community of artists, students and teachers.
An artistic life in Edinburgh
In 1974, Rosemary married the artist Rendell Wells, who was more than twenty years her senior.
Wells was an established and rather interesting figure in Edinburgh's artistic and literary circles.
His career had included involvement with the New Era Group in the late 1930s, wartime art teaching and a wide-ranging artistic practice.
Rosemary and Rendell divided their lives between Edinburgh and Portpatrick, a small coastal village in Dumfries and Galloway.
It is tempting to imagine the conversations, paintings and artistic exchanges that must have taken place between two artists sharing their lives, although the precise nature of their working relationship remains largely undocumented.
What we can say is that Rosemary continued to develop her own painting practice.
And the paintings themselves give us plenty to talk about.
A painter who loved paint
One of the first things you notice about Rosemary's work is the texture.
She was not a painter who simply used colour to describe a landscape.
She built her paintings.
Thick passages of paint sit alongside areas of scraping and visible brushwork. Colours overlap, surfaces catch the light and the movement of the paint becomes an important part of the composition.
In some of her landscapes, the paint is so heavily worked that the surface almost becomes a landscape in its own right.
I particularly enjoy this quality.
There is something wonderfully direct about an artist who allows you to see how a painting has been made.
You can follow the movement of the brush, see where one colour has been worked into another and appreciate the decisions that have gone into constructing the image.
These are paintings that really benefit from being seen in person.
A photograph can show you the composition, but it cannot quite convey the physical presence of the paint.
Colour, landscape and the world around her
Rosemary frequently turned to the landscape for her subjects.
Her paintings are often full of colour, with thickly applied passages of paint suggesting the movement of land, vegetation and sky.
Rather than carefully describing every feature, she seems to have been interested in capturing the character of a place through colour, texture and movement.
There is a freedom to her approach.
Forms are sometimes simplified, colours are pushed beyond strict naturalism and the paint itself is allowed to do much of the work.
Her years spent between Edinburgh and Portpatrick placed her within reach of two very different Scottish environments: the architecture and urban landscape of the capital, and the open coastal scenery of southwest Scotland.
Although we cannot confidently identify the locations of every painting, the natural world was clearly an important subject for her.
What I particularly like is that the paintings do not feel overly concerned with being neat.
There is energy in them.
And there is something rather refreshing about that.
The early paintings
For me, one of the most interesting aspects of this collection is the opportunity to see Rosemary's earlier work alongside paintings made later in her life.
The art college pieces offer a glimpse of a younger artist experimenting with composition, colour and subject matter.
They are also a reminder that an artist's career is rarely a straight line.
Styles change. Interests develop. Sometimes an artist spends years exploring an entirely different way of working.
Looking at these paintings together allows us to appreciate Rosemary's work as a developing practice rather than judging it through a single painting or period.
I think that is important, particularly when dealing with artists whose work has not been extensively documented.
The paintings themselves are often our most valuable source of information.
The later years
Rosemary continued painting into her later life, producing colourful, textured works that demonstrate her enduring interest in the landscape and the possibilities of paint.
Rosemary spent her final years in Stranraer.
Her paintings, however, remain.
And it is through them that we can begin to piece together a fuller picture of her artistic life.
There is still much to discover about Rosemary Broom. Her exhibition history, the development of her work and the details of her artistic career all deserve further research.
I rather enjoy that part of dealing in twentieth-century art.
Sometimes the research begins with a familiar name and a well-documented career.
Other times, it begins with a group of paintings and a determination to find out more about the person who made them.
Rosemary belongs to the latter category.
Why we bought her work
I have always enjoyed finding artists whose work has been overlooked.
Not every accomplished painter becomes a household name, and not every interesting painting comes with an impressive auction record.
Sometimes you simply find a group of paintings that make you stop and look.
That was the case with Rosemary.
What particularly appeals to me is the opportunity to offer original paintings by an artist with a proper art school education and a lifetime of painting behind her, at prices that make owning original art genuinely accessible.
Some of the works still have frames chosen by Rosemary herself. They may not always be the frames I would have selected, but I rather like the fact that they have remained with the paintings.
They are part of the story.
And that is what makes dealing in original art so enjoyable.
You are not simply buying an image. You are buying something that another person has spent time making, considering and living with.
In Rosemary's case, we have the added pleasure of being able to offer works from different periods of her life, from her early art college days to paintings made many decades later.
A little collection that allows us to get to know an artist who deserves to be better known.
