The business plan behind Castlegate House in Cockermouth

But for Steve Swallow, the main obstacle in his line of work is a little different.

‘It can be hard selling things that people don’t need,’ he admits with a wry smile.

This is particularly true when the items in question cost thousands.

‘There are a lot of things people can spend this kind of money on,’ he says.

Castlegate House Gallery doesn’t operate like most businesses, which is providing a service or product that resolves a problem. Instead, it functions on a personal and aesthetic level – and every day, its owner has to make a new choice about a different piece work that might appeal to a buyer who may not even be out there.

‘I get up each morning and I buy art for a living,’ Swallow says.

‘I put my own money in and then try and find a buyer, and wherever they might be, I deliver it to them. I personally deliver 80% of everything we sell, wherever it is in the UK. This is one of the reasons I travel 50,000 miles a year.

‘We have an unusual model here. It’s a very capital intensive way of running a business. Other companies would say they do [something similar]. But it’s different with us. If you're in retail, for instance, you buy season by season, and you’re putting your order in three seasons ahead, and if it doesn't sell, you have a sale at the end of it. That's not how art works. The liquidity of paintings from the 1950s, for instance, isn't the same as pair of shoes.

‘But then you can have a quiet week in the gallery, and somebody contacts you by email and is interested in buying something that's £80,000.’

Every day is a throw of the dice. But Swallow – who is a self-described obsessive personality – has made a successful career out of his passion for paintings. 20th Century contemporary British art had always been his fascination, and after spending 13 years working in the financial sector, Swallow decided he ‘didn’t want to get to 60’ and wonder what might have been. In 2012, his family moved back up north and purchased the two-storey Castlegate House Gallery.

‘I didn't walk away [from my old career] wealthy and thinking this could be a hobby – this needed to work,’ Swallow admits.

‘But I was obsessed by this world before I ever came into it commercially, so I had some experience, which helped. Plus, I genuinely love what I do.

‘I love discovering where art has been, where it’s come from, and the excitement of not knowing what the next phone call may offer. I love to discover paintings the art world didn’t know existed and then see them hanging on new walls, creating new collections with people who have the same passion for beautiful things.’

Swallow set up the business with the aim of showing and selling works that people wouldn't normally see outside London, as well as supporting new and upcoming artists. Today, Castlegate is one of the few galleries outside Mayfair where you can see something by David Hockney or Frank Auerbach. It is also the main gallery for arguably the most important Cumbrian artist there ever has been: Sheila Fell.

Passion has helped fuel the success of Castlegate, but Swallow says patience and persistence in building relationships have also been instrumental in bringing in business.

He explains: ‘You don't want to sell some people one painting; you want to sell them one painting a year for the next 20 years.

‘There are occasions where you buy things with people in mind. But more often, I buy things that I’ve got to want to own myself.

‘I would never tell somebody why they should like something. That’s incredibly arrogant. But I can tell them why I like it and why I think it's good. I've got to be absolutely convinced that when I'm stood in front of something with somebody, I can really genuinely see the merit in it. That's a great discipline when you're spending your own money on something.’

This is a business where people often need to see the work in question before they will commit to investing. However, going digital has played a significant part in promoting the gallery and remains a vital cog in the business model.

‘Our website is our shop window,’ Swallow says.

‘If we’re busy, we might get 10 people through the door of the gallery. But I'll get 500 people on the website. These relationships I was referring to extend to other forms.’

A challenge which has emerged in the digital age, however, has been the rise of scamming in the art sector. Due to the visual nature of the work, Instagram has been a popular stomping ground for con-artists. According to Swallow, scammers pledge to purchase art from creators and send a link to open a ‘cryptocurrency account’ to accept the money, which charges users a fee to get started. That money is pocketed and the artist never receive the cash they were promised.

The sector has also seen the emergence of non-fungible tokens (NFTs): unique digital assets that can take the form of images. Swallow says he was always sceptical of this trend.

‘I completely get how you can turn something that is digital, that has never been able to be collected, into something you can collect,’ he says.

‘I get why you can own the first ever tweet, and I get why you can create digital art. But taking something that is an actual physical human creation and digitising it and saying now there's something new there… people have been doing that for 100 years. That's a print. So, I'm not really sure who the market for [NFTs] was. And now it has basically completely disappeared.’

Scams surrounding physical art also continues to take place, with the gallery often asked to authenticate works before they go on sale. According to Swallow, sometimes these fake works have been previously sold at auction and are put back into circulation by an unwitting seller who has inherited them, whereas others are trying their luck.

‘I don't think there's someone nefariously sat there in an attic painting Sheila Fells,’ Swallow says.

‘But people have got to be careful, because if they see a really small drawing by ‘her’, they think they can be worth £6,000 to £8,000. And they're not worth anything.’

The authentication process, according to Swallow, involves disregarding any ascribed provenance (e.g. signatures on the art) and instead focusing on the aesthetics of the image.

Swallow says: ‘You have to consider: Does it make sense that this work would have been created by that artist? Also how it's drawn or painted, the colour palette, the era it's meant to be from. Does that make sense in terms of what that artist was doing?

‘What you tend to find is when people do fakes, they go over the top to try and persuade you that it's right. So, there are things written on the back. It's people trying to persuade you it's real, and they try too hard. It will have something like ‘90 guineas’ to make it look more authentic, or ‘Property of Lord So and So’.

‘Over the years, you begin to see the red flags. But that requires time and discipline and effort to sit down and have a look at these things. There are no shortcuts.’

Whilst Castlegate’s strong relationship and reputation for authentication make it a standout business in the market, its real competition is, according to Swallow, people spending money on other things.

‘The volatility of the economics and geopolitics is affecting people's willingness to spend money, but that volatility is now the norm,’ Swallow says.

‘At any point in time you can say there was Brexit, Liz Truss’s budget, the invasion of Ukraine, the cost of living crisis. There's always something. And you've just got to live with that.

‘We've done okay. We continue to do okay. If we just bought things from artists to sell on their behalf, stuck them on the wall and sat back, we’d have no chance. But if you're really working with social media and making sure your website is as good as it can be, building those relationships, and taking things to people to view in their own homes – then that's where you see success.

‘I think it's about just really putting the work in. And if you put the work in, then you've got a very good chance of seeing through any of the tough times.’