Robert Lenkiewicz

His mother was a German baroness and his father a Polish horse breeder who both fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and arrived in London as penniless refugees.

Lenkiewicz frequently stated in interview that the hotel's elderly residents included Holocaust survivors but this is contradicted by the artist's brother John, who recollects that the residents tended to be the parents or grandparents of 2nd or 3rd generation English Jews (for instance, the mother of popular entertainer Dickie Valentine), though the hotel's Czechoslovakian cook, Mrs Bobek, was a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Nevertheless, the loneliness and suffering the young painter witnessed at the hotel was "salutary and thought-provoking" according to Lenkiewicz.

Lenkiewicz was inspired to paint after seeing Charles Laughton in Alexander Korda's biographical film Rembrandt.

Robert Oscar Lenkiewicz (31 December 1941 – 5 August 2002) was one of South West England's most celebrated artists of modern times.

Perennially unfashionable in high art circles, his work was nevertheless popular with the public.

Lenkiewicz is regarded by some as a great painter who is 'finally being recognised as such after all these years of neglect by the art establishment, particularly by London, who would never have him.

He didn't play the game as far as London commercial galleries were concerned.

He did his own thing out in the provinces, which was looked down upon.'

Robert Lenkiewicz was born in London in 1941, the son of refugees who ran a Jewish hotel in Fordwych Road.

Robert Lenkiewicz spent his boyhood in the Hotel Shemtov in Cricklewood, which was run by his parents.

He attended Sir Christopher Wren junior technical school of art architecture and building from 1955 to 1958 graduating in art with distinction.

At 16, Lenkiewicz was accepted at Saint Martin's School of Art and later attended the Royal Academy.

However, he was virtually impervious to contemporary art fashions, being more interested in his favourite paintings in the National Gallery.

Inspired by the example of Albert Schweitzer, Lenkiewicz threw open the doors of his studios to anyone in need of a roof – down and outs, addicts, criminals and the mentally ill congregated there.

These individuals were the subjects of his paintings as a young man.

The Foundation has curated a number of posthumous exhibitions: Self-Portraits 1956-2002 at the Ben Uri Gallery, Jewish Museum of Art in London in 2008; Lenkiewicz: The Legacy – Works from The Lenkiewicz Foundation Collection at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery in 2009; Still Lives at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol in 2011; Death and the Maiden at Torre Abbey, in Torquay later that year; and Human, All Too Human at the Royal William Yard in the artist's adopted city of Plymouth in 2012.

However, such colourful characters were not welcomed by his neighbours and he was obliged to leave London in 1964.

He spent a year living in a remote cottage near Lanreath in Cornwall, supporting his young family by teaching, before being offered studio space on the Barbican in Plymouth by local artist and businessman John Nash.

The artist's home and studios once more became a magnet for vagrants and street alcoholics, who then sat for paintings.

Their numbers swelled and Lenkiewicz was forced to commandeer derelict warehouses in the city to house the 'dossers'.

He first came to public attention when the media highlighted his giant mural on Plymouth's Barbican in the 1970s.

He produced as many as 10,000 works (though this figure includes his prolific output as a pencil portrait artist), often on a large scale, and in themed 'projects' investigating hidden communities (Vagrancy 1973, Mental Handicap 1976) or difficult social issues (Suicide 1980, Death 1982).

One of these warehouses also served as a studio and in 1973 became the exhibition space for the Vagrancy Project.

In 1981, he faked his death, announcing his demise to the local newspapers.

Another furore occurred in 1981 when he faked his own death in preparation for the forthcoming project on the theme of Death (1982): "I could not know what it was like to be dead," said the artist, "but I could discover what it was like to be thought dead."

After his first exhibition with an established art dealer in the 1990s, Lenkiewicz's work enjoyed growing commercial success and some recognition by the establishment.

The Lenkiewicz Foundation (educational charity) was established in 1997, received the bequest of the painter's remaining collection of works.

He received a major retrospective in 1997 at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, attended by 42,000 visitors.

In his obituary of Lenkiewicz, art critic David Lee observed: "Robert's greatest gift was to show us that an artist could be genuinely concerned about social and domestic issues and attempt the difficult task of expressing this conscience through the deeply unfashionable medium of figurative painting. In that sense, he was one of few serious painters of contemporary history."

When Lenkiewicz died in 2002, he left behind a particularly macabre legacy as the embalmed body of one of his friends, a tramp named Diogenes, was found in the cupboard section at the bottom of a bookcase.

Lenkiewicz, aged 60, died of a heart attack in 2002.

Despite his prolific output, he had only £12 cash in his possession (allegedly having never opened a bank account), and owed £2 million to various creditors.

Since his death, examples of his best paintings have fetched six figure sums in London auction rooms.

The rise in Lenkiewicz's popularity was shown in the estate auctions of his personal collection of his own works.

At Sotheby's in 2003, Bearnes 2004 and 2008, his paintings and private library raised £2.1 million.

A number of myths have arisen surrounding the artist's unusual barter economics, such as that Lenkiewicz never paid tax or kept any records of sales of his works; indeed, it is sometimes claimed that he never sold his work at all despite all his exhibition lists now in the public domain bearing prices.

It is the case, however, that Lenkiewicz operated a system of patronage whereby a long-term collector or interested buyer would be handed a bill or two to be settled on behalf of the painter.

The artist's voluminous diaries, illustrated notebooks and relationship journals are in the Foundation's collection, which was shown at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery in 2009.

This exhibition, in expanded form, travelled to Germany (Spinnerei in Leipzig and AufAEG in Nuremberg) in 2013, where it became the first overseas exhibition of the artist's work to date.