Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps, please, bartender – oh and an original artwork too …

That’s the kind of order the Drake Manor Inn at Buckland Monachorum has been getting since it hosted a wake for Dartmoor celebrity Robin Armstrong, artist, author and fisherman, after his funeral on March 20.

Landlady Mandy Robinson is hoping to ring up a few more sales like it before she closes an exhibition of Mr Armstrong’s last unsold paintings in the pub dining room.

The artist died at the Blackdown Nursing Home at Mary Tavy, aged 78, from complications following a car crash in 2021. But before he went into care he had a home and studio on the edge of Horrabridge.

The Drake Manor was one of his favourite pubs ever since he was a river warden in the 70s and 80s, dicing with poachers on the Walkham and the Tavy.

Originally from the Orpington area of London, he began working life as an office boy, then a gamekeeper's assistant in Sussex, but it was already clear that his real talent was drawing and painting. He came to live in Devon around 1970, teaching in schools in between selling paintings and fishing with his first landlord, the environmentalist campaigner and writer Ewan Clarkson.

In 1977 he picked up a job as a river warden.

In those days, before cheap farmed salmon, a lot of kitchens paid well at the back door.

It was a risky business chasing the poachers around lonely places and Mr Armstrong had to be careful where he went for a beer. But he gained respect for his nerve and his country skills and some of the poachers became friends – and even customers for his meticulous paintings of fish, birds, animals and landscapes.

He wrote about his adventures in his first book, The Painted Stream, which he also illustrated. Published in 1984, it made him famous enough to make a living, from 1989, as an artist and fishing guide and a dealer in painting and angling gear. Until his accident, he ran a weekly stall in Tavistock Pannier Market, selling pictures and classic rods, reels, flies and so on.

He was a regular illustrator for Trout & Salmon magazine and a fishing partner to some famous names. He had some big hits. But he was often broke and many of his friends have a painting picked up for a song on a Friday night.

His first wife, Pat, who died in 2022, gave him a daughter, Tamsin, 54, who lives near Bideford, with her daughter, Eilisha. Eleven years later, with his second wife, Annie, he had a son, Owen, who lives in Canada. He was married a third time, to Grace, but ended up living as a bachelor again.

The exhibition at the Drake Manor includes 16 pictures, ranging from £220 to £685. Money raised will go towards settling his care bills and making donations in his memory to the RSPB and Dementia UK.