I. M. Birtwistle

I. M. Birtwistle was no ordinary art dealer. When you went to her gallery, buying a painting was the least important prospect - almost an add-on to the cultural experience. Her reputation rested on her continuing to run her business, and her ability still to "see" works of art, despite becoming totally blind by 1993.

"One couldn't fail to be inspired by her," says David Greenall, a fisherman turned landscape painter who was encouraged by her to go to art school. The gallery, Deepdale Exhibitions, partly based in a caravan, at Burnham Deepdale on the north Norfolk coast, provided the focus for her enthusiasm and a venue for younger generations of visitors. The novelty of its position gave it some publicity, but her main aim was to get individual people to recognise the honesty of an individual work of art.

Iris Mary Birtwistle was born in Hoghton, Lancashire, in the last year of the First World War, one of eight children from a recusant Roman Catholic family. Her father's forebears had lost their faith during the 19th century: he was a prosperous cotton-mill owner whose extended family remained resolutely anti-Catholic. Her mother, one of whose brothers was Dom Stephen Marwood, a Benedictine monk at Ampleforth, brought the Catholicism back into the family and Iris, who preferred to be known by her initials or "Lilla" to close friends, was continuously inspired by her religion.

Her uncle and his colleague Father Bernard McElligott, an expert on Gregorian plain chant who often wrote the sleeve notes for new recordings, had a profound influence on her early perception of Catholicism and its relationship with music.

She was sent to boarding school, where she became a good violinist, playing in the school orchestra and loved riding (then hunting latterly) and games at school. Upon returning for the holidays she formed a weekly club for girls, playing 78rpm records on a wind-up gramophone in the village hall between Hoghton and Brindle, recognising that the privileges she was experiencing were not universal. Her mother encouraged her to apply to the Reimann Art School in London; there she began to write poetry - many of her poems were to appear in the periodicals of the Forties.

Upon the outbreak of the Second World War she joined the WRNS, where she also started up a musical appreciation society, and was stationed in the Orkneys and in Kent. She was a keen sailor and used to race a whaler at Portsmouth.

In 1950 she moved to Suffolk, opening her first gallery in Walberswick (later it would move to Ipswich), and taking black-and-white portrait photographs: a memorable one being that of the photographer Mark Fiennes, which was used for his retrospective exhibition at the Menier Gallery in London in 2003.

Infuriated by the assumption that becoming blind must have heightened her other remaining four senses, she none the less possessed what might be described as a sixth sense: the broadcaster Piers Plowright relates her description of being billeted to Ashford during the war and immediately feeling she couldn't sleep the night there: only later it emerged that Aleister Crowley had celebrated black masses there. She talked often about guardian angels and once sprinkled holy water round after a kind neighbour, thinking he had already left the worst bits out, read her explicit passages from his autobiography.

Birtwistle's interest in music was a constant thread: artists, instead of receiving inventories of paintings they had consigned to her, were given recommendations for music to listen to and books to read. She eschewed the duller aspects of running a gallery yet was always professional - constantly selling, or even buying work in advance if she recognised it would really help an artist, paying up promptly; and the trust was returned. Academicians such as Jeffrey Camp, Philip Sutton and, when still unknown, David Hockney showed with her and she became great friends with some, including the sculptress Ros Stracey.

Her taste was mostly figurative, though the abstract collagist David Hazelwood was championed extensively, and her reach sometimes international: Franz Meyer from Switzerland, whom she first met through her gallery in Walberswick, was invited over. Her artists, also including Mary Potter, Mary Newcomb, Petrina Ferrey, Judith Foster and Jenny Smith, often swapped work with each other and she was delighted to witness this without thinking of charging a commission.

She remained unintimidated by the art establishment: in order to categorise her, some commentators, particularly those from television, tried to put her into a box; but in person she defied stereotypes.

Catholic writers such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Penelope Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark provided her with inspiration and she liked to have the Divine Office read to her before sleep. She contributed a chapter to last year's anthology Why I Am Still a Catholic, edited by Peter Stanford, and the defining sentence, amidst some nostalgia and occasional downright disapproval, could be its opening one - "Catholicism is a great solace at my stage of life, but it doesn't get any more straightforward." Her constant questioning and search for people to discuss the answers with energised what might have become a peaceful rural retirement.

During the day the radio was on constantly: one lunch guest recalls her suddenly leaving the table saying she had to listen to the Radio 3 lunchtime concert; conversation could resume only when it was over. If she liked what she had heard she would follow it through: that is how she regained touch with the Fiennes family - when Mark Fiennes's wife Jini (the novelist Jennifer Lash) had worked for her in the early 1950s, Birtwistle had been a great source of strength. Their daughter Martha Fiennes, the film-maker, had been on the radio some seven years ago and upon receiving a letter from Birtwistle hastened up to Norfolk to meet her. She admits to being bowled over by how sharp Birtwistle's observations and wit remained. Others charmed by her rare and extraordinary grasp, and ability to "say it straight", included the singer Nick Cave.

Birtwistle brought up three adopted sons on her own, and in her later years she came to rely on her assistant Ruth Dunne, known as "Tootoo" (as in "too too good"), who helped to keep the gallery going. Her surviving younger sister, the poet Angela Kirby, plans to publish a long-awaited book of her poetry, ideally illustrated by colour plates of the work she championed from the 1950s to the present day.

Magdalen Evans