Love strikes unexpectedly. For art dealer John Martin, it happened at a west London auction 20 years ago. There, tucked incongruously among tribal art and collectables, was an extraordinary panel, ‘a huge, shimmering depiction of the Garden of Eden, its story picked out on aluminium sheets with thousands of tiny punch marks’. God, dressed as an African king, sat enthroned, flanked by angels; animals grazed peacefully in Paradise — but the Serpent rose up to tempt Eve, leading, in the next scene, to the Expulsion, with an elephant flattening a tree and the beginning of the eternal cycle of hunter and hunted. Mr Martin was smitten—and bought it.

‘At the time, I knew nothing of its maker, Asiru Olatunde, a Nigerian blacksmith of the Oshogbo school of artists that emerged in the 1960s, nor of

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