Several years ago, a number of paintings were taken from a house in Tooting, South London. They were the work of a man called Ernie Parker who had lived in that house for a very long time. He was born in 1900 and worked as a respected hairdresser until his retirement. He had seen two World Wars, too young to take part in the 1st World War and too old for the Second.

His great love was painting and he produced many, mainly landscape and still life studies. He would get them framed and then either give them as gifts to his friends or hang them on the walls of his own house. Luckily for us, he used to take a colour transparency of his best works being of a high enough quality to enable me to scan them into a computer and preserve them in a digital form.

He suffered a stroke and it was thought that he would not survive. He was hospitalised for a while and the house remained empty during that time. He made a good recovery but it was thought that a nursing home would be a more appropriate alternative at this time. The house was quite cold in the Winter months and he was in his 90s. It was decided that the house should be sold, which would go some way to pay for his nursing home care. The paintings were the last items to be collected from the house but unfortunately not by the relatives. Whether or not the people that took them thought that they were of great worth, will never be known. We still have a few; up until the time of his stroke he was hand painting Christmas cards, sometimes as many as forty five each year.

Some of his still life studies were absolutely exquisite and some of the objects in those studies, painted in the forties, still exist today. It's a shame that these works were stolen but in other respects the World Wide Web has enabled you to see the fine work of this as yet, unknown artist.

Ernie Parker died in October 1996 aged 96. He was never told that his paintings were stolen.

Lovely, aren't they?