© Estate of Alfred Cohen 2020

‘As supermarkets clump across the land, small shops disappear and the artist Alfred Cohen mourns their passing’, observed journalist Philip Oakes. In the 1980s and 1990s Cohen started painting shop-fronts, especially in seaside towns, ‘all too often […] within weeks of their being demolished’, he lamented. Fortunately, the Life-Boat Café still looks out over the beach at Cromer in Norfolk. As the flags and the cuisine suggest, this picture is about quintessential Englishness. But there is a humour in all those signs. George Myerson writes of it: ‘This is the loveliest painting of writing that I know’.