Alexander Wolfe - New Cross Rembrandt Dealer?

From The Sunday Times, 10 January:

'...Alexander Wolfe was a lead singer without a band after their keyboard player left to sign a multi-million-pound solo deal. What was to be spectacularly good news for Jamie Cullum left Wolfe wondering where next to turn. Then he remembered the artwork he had inherited from his French grandfather. The small lithograph of an elderly beggar seeking alms, produced in 1630, had been hanging on the wall in his bedsit in south London for more than a decade. It was a precious treasure: the only link to a family he never knew and, by his own admission, “the only thing of value that I owned”. However, it was also the passport to his dreams.

Wolfe took it down, wondering what it might be worth. “And on the back there was a letter to an ancestor of mine from the painter, who gave it to him as a gift. And it was signed ‘Rembrandt’.” At auction, the print fetched £9,000. Within days, Wolfe had gone out and bought everything he needed to bring his music dreams to life...

Says Wolfe: “It was hard to let the painting go, because it was my only connection with my French family, but there was no real point in hanging a Rembrandt in a bedsit in New Cross. I justified it as selling art to make art.” He adds: “I never knew my French grandfather. We only met once and he died when I was 14, but I owe my career to him.” With his new equipment, Wolfe set to work to make Morning Brings a Flood, a beautiful album with echoes of Nick Drake, inspired by an artistic vision. “The idea was to make a record about darkness and light,” he says. Recorded over the course of a year, much of it in his own home, Wolfe played almost all the instruments — guitar, bass, piano, drums, sitar, organ, harmonium and glockenspiel — and produced it himself'.

The album was recorded in New Cross - at his twitter feed, Alexander describes himself as 'the only French lord in New Cross'!. Here's his song Teabags in Ashtrays: