Editing Robert Lenkiewicz (section)

==Later life and death==
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. 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 (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." 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,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.bhandl.co.uk/news/2008/04/01/lenkiewicz-2008.aspx|title=Lenkiewicz 2008|date=April 2008|access-date=16 July 2012|archive-date=6 May 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130506110112/http://www.bhandl.co.uk/news/2008/04/01/lenkiewicz-2008.aspx|url-status=dead}}</ref> 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.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.robertlenkiewicz.org/content/vagrancy|title=Vagrancy &#124; Robert Lenkiewicz &#124; Paintings and Original Works|website=www.robertlenkiewicz.org}}</ref> 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. This system operated until the mid-1990s, when the artist began to regularize his financial affairs in negotiation with the [[HM Revenue and Customs|HMRC]]. Subsequent to the painter's death in 2002, media reports put the value of the artist's estate as £6.5 million. This figure included a cursory valuation of the artist's antiquarian library of rare books on [[witchcraft]], the occult, [[metaphysics]] and medieval philosophy. However, the sale of this entire collection by Sotheby's in 2003 raised less than £1 million.