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Frank Walsh, Wheeler-Dealer

© Melissa Scott-Miller. All rights reserved, DACS 2024. Image credit: Girton College, University of Cambridge

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Born in Dublin in 1952, Frank Walsh learned how to duck and dive at an early age. Abandoned by his parents, for whom alcohol was high on their list of priorities, he was brought up in a Christian Brothers orphanage. In his early teens, he was reunited with his mother, who later smuggled her 15-year-old son out of the institution, and took him to London, where they became great drinking companions. He visited a church jumble sale where he bought some silver for sixpence and I sold it on to an antique dealer for £10 – a fortune for a young lad in the late sixties. Although he has not achieved such a successful mark-up since then, it set the pattern for his working life. He was in and out of church sales, buying anything which caught his ever-improving eye until the Antiques Roadshow on television came along in the early eighties and ruined it all for the likes of Frank, who gave up drinking about the same time.

Royal Society of Portrait Painters People's Portraits collection at Girton College, University of Cambridge

Cambridge

Title

Frank Walsh, Wheeler-Dealer

Date

2000

Medium

oil on canvas

Measurements

H 120 x W 100 cm

Accession number

482

Acquisition method

on loan from the Royal Society of Portrait Painters

Work type

Painting

Inscription description

signature

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Royal Society of Portrait Painters People's Portraits collection at Girton College, University of Cambridge

Huntingdon Road, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire CB3 0JG England

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