As a long-time friend of Terry O’Neill, Beetles attempted to revive the fashionable 1960s photographer’s stalled career by mounting a retrospective of O’Neill portraits, including images of Brigitte Bardot and Frank Sinatra. It proved a sell-out and Beetles repeated the experiment with Antony Armstrong-Jones (Lord Snowdon), another neglected face of the 1960s, who had never had a commercial show. Again, it tapped a nostalgic demand for images of a glamorous age. A new specialist gallery seemed the obvious next step.

Beetles persuades collectors to pay substantial sums for well-displayed, well-researched illustrations and cartoons, and has a client list of more than 20,000. “There is an obvious link between works on paper and photography and it should not be too difficult to interest someone spending £3,500 on a cartoon by Rowlandson in a John Swannell nude at around the same price.”