Modern oil paintings can cheer us up and calm us down – and prove a perky investment. Ian Collins offers a collector’s guide.

Critics and cynics are forever claiming that painting is as dead as a shark afloat in formaldehyde. Wrong. So much is going swimmingly in the painterly British world of oil on canvas.

This oil painting of summer flowers, by East Anglian master John Nash, is tipped to fetch £7,000-£10,000 at a Sotheby's sale in London on December 11.

Forget those Saatchi-hyped unmade beds and heads composed of frozen blood. For the contemporary art market is now far wider than the art of marketing at which Mrs Thatcher’s adman is an unrivalled Old Master.

A century ago the pioneering painter Walter Sickert – the Damien Hirst of his day said that, at its heart, art should be about the “decoration of rooms”.

Most of us have more spare wall space than floor space. Generally, even a small flat has room for a gallery. And whereas watercolours can fade to blank sheets of paper on a bright wall, an oil on canvas positively benefits from sunlight.

Pictures cheer us up and calm us down. And, although fashions change within the art market, modern British paintings can prove a perky investment.

Britain now accounts for 23pc of the global market in contemporary art. No longer a backwater of the art world, we have the world-class artists, plus the dealers, salerooms and buyers, to make a major mark. Prices, more than doubling in the last decade, are still surging.

Susannah Pollen, former head of the Modern British Pictures department at Sotheby’s, says: “There is an enduring quality to oil on canvas. The way the paint is applied speaks volumes through gesture and texture and through saturating the eye with wonderful colours and sensations.
You can look at a good painting again and again and see something new every time.”

Pollen said “really good” British works of art can be acquired for £10,000 or less. She recommends recently underrated 1950s artists – the Kitchen Sink painters (John Bratby, Jack Smith, Derrick Greaves), plus Alan Reynolds, Ceri Richards and Prunella Clough.

But she thinks portraits are a problem. “It is difficult to see what is genuinely good. Go back a bit and the fog clears. Thirty years ago Sir Alfred Munnings was a decorative horse and portrait painter. Now he is practically a social realist because that era has gone and there’s a nostalgia to it.”

As a very general rule, abstract art is less expensive because it is less accessible – but that’s now changing fast, in part following household fashion.

As with any other form of collecting, the advice to would-be buyers of modern British pictures is to look widely and deeply – in salerooms, fairs, college degree shows, open studios and galleries. Study books, catalogues and websites. Buy the very best you can afford and only what you love and can imagine living with for at least 10 years.

I myself have a collector’s warped priorities – stacking paintings against the walls of a rented room in London, when I should have bought a house long before. But I only once acquired a picture as an investment.

On Greenwich Market 16 years ago I found a large 1950s oil of sunflowers by John Bratby for £90. I intended leaving it on my wall for a few weeks before selling for an enormous profit. Then a strange thing happened – I fell for it. The picture is now a highlight of my collection and its monetary value is meaningless.

There are many fields of discovery in the British art of our times. At an East Anglian car boot sale recently, a friend of mine bought an unsigned landscape oil hoping it might be by Cedric Morris, tutor of Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling. She handed over £20 with amazing speed. “Ha, ha!” said the seller, as he pocketed the note. “If you’d haggled you could have had it for a tenner.”

But once her hunch was proved correct my pal owned a picture worth £10,000. And no, she’s not selling that one either.