When Chris and Michael Wadsworth moved to the English Lake District in 1986 they were looking to buy a modest rural cottage with a good view. That was before Chris looked round a large Georgian house in a market town on the Western fringe of the National Park and impulsively decided they should buy it and she would make it a live-in art gallery. Castlegate House opened its doors to the public the following summer of 1987 giving her a life beyond anything she had ever imagined. Few days were without drama over the next 25 years; the skinhead on a Ducati, the travelling knob man and the family of bare footers were among the multitude of strolling players who turned up on her doorstep. Chris would try to appear unruffled at all times before escaping to the 'futility room' to perform a Munch silent scream.
Although she was inundated by eager artists from the start, she had to search out the people whose work she really wanted to show and then persuade them that her gallery - Castlegate House in Cockermouth - was the place to be seen.
Good artists were hard to track down and when she did it was even harder to persuade them to give her an exhibition at the beginning. She sometimes had to use the skills of a detective to find the people she wanted. She thought Cumbrian transvestite postman Percy Kelly would be easy to find. Everyone must know him. Nobody told her that he had run away with a well-respected surgeon's wife, first to Kendal, then to the far reaches of Pembrokeshire and finally to rural Norfolk where he had become a recluse. Other fine artists were equally elusive.
In Life Class she writes about her life as a gallery owner. She tells stories about wonderful painters, frustrating artists, eccentric clients and extraordinary friendships. You can read the story of the L S Lowry exhibition put on as a cheer up after the terrible foot and mouth outbreak of 2001 and the first Sheila Fell exhibition in a commercial gallery in Cumbria since her untimely death aged 48. Learn about the Royal Academician with a Crazy Heart who lives on the island of Menorca: her enforced purchase of a pair of Magic Knickers in Glasgow: dinner in Soho with a man who claimed he could dream the winners of horse races: the discovery of a possible Ben Nicholson relief in an unlikely place and a swift escape from Christies' Auction House in London on a number 14 bus with a 'stolen' Sheila Fell painting.
With Art Dealer shown beside occupation in her passport she travelled the world falling over art and artists wherever she landed - finding works by Charles Oakley in Chicago, getting lost in the underground storeroom of the Hermitage in St Petersburg and finding out why ceramics in Japan sell for thousands of pounds.
Life Class is a wonderfully entertaining memoir of a life in art that was never planned. Chris tells it how it was - the triumphs and mishaps - with a string of sharply observed characters and many an adventure along the way. It turns from hilarity to sadness in a blink.
Whether you are an art lover interested in how a gallery works or an artist wondering how to approach a gallery and get your work on the walls or maybe you've thought you might enjoy running a gallery and wondered what happens behind the green baize door, this book will tell you what it is really like.
Although she was inundated by eager artists from the start, she had to search out the people whose work she really wanted to show and then persuade them that her gallery - Castlegate House in Cockermouth - was the place to be seen.
Good artists were hard to track down and when she did it was even harder to persuade them to give her an exhibition at the beginning. She sometimes had to use the skills of a detective to find the people she wanted. She thought Cumbrian transvestite postman Percy Kelly would be easy to find. Everyone must know him. Nobody told her that he had run away with a well-respected surgeon's wife, first to Kendal, then to the far reaches of Pembrokeshire and finally to rural Norfolk where he had become a recluse. Other fine artists were equally elusive.
In Life Class she writes about her life as a gallery owner. She tells stories about wonderful painters, frustrating artists, eccentric clients and extraordinary friendships. You can read the story of the L S Lowry exhibition put on as a cheer up after the terrible foot and mouth outbreak of 2001 and the first Sheila Fell exhibition in a commercial gallery in Cumbria since her untimely death aged 48. Learn about the Royal Academician with a Crazy Heart who lives on the island of Menorca: her enforced purchase of a pair of Magic Knickers in Glasgow: dinner in Soho with a man who claimed he could dream the winners of horse races: the discovery of a possible Ben Nicholson relief in an unlikely place and a swift escape from Christies' Auction House in London on a number 14 bus with a 'stolen' Sheila Fell painting.
With Art Dealer shown beside occupation in her passport she travelled the world falling over art and artists wherever she landed - finding works by Charles Oakley in Chicago, getting lost in the underground storeroom of the Hermitage in St Petersburg and finding out why ceramics in Japan sell for thousands of pounds.
Life Class is a wonderfully entertaining memoir of a life in art that was never planned. Chris tells it how it was - the triumphs and mishaps - with a string of sharply observed characters and many an adventure along the way. It turns from hilarity to sadness in a blink.
Whether you are an art lover interested in how a gallery works or an artist wondering how to approach a gallery and get your work on the walls or maybe you've thought you might enjoy running a gallery and wondered what happens behind the green baize door, this book will tell you what it is really like.
