It’s not every day that you unexpectedly recognise not only one but possibly two family members in different artworks within the same exhibition.

Patrice Minors was not planning to attend the opening of A Study in Light & Colour: Selections from the David L White Collection at the Bermuda National Gallery last month, but her daughter wanted to see the exhibition, which brings together 21 Bermuda artworks painted by American Impressionists during the first half of the 20th century, so she came along.

“We're walking around and then I got here [in front of Bermuda House by Rupert Lovejoy] and I just stopped,” she explained. “I said, that looks like Duke of Kent Street. That looks like my grandfather's building!”

The landscape was painted about 100 years ago yet the recognition was instant. “It was so funny because when I had looked at that picture right there earlier,” she said, pointing to After the Service by John Lavalle (1950), which is hung on the opposite wall, “I thought that looks like my grandmother! And this was in St George’s as well so it could have been.”

Conferring with family members, including cousins Allen and Noel Van Putten, Sabrina DeSilva and Tanya Johnson, Ms Minors has since come to the conclusion that it may not be her grandmother, Nora Francis (née Jones) in John Lavalle’s painting after all, although she is not entirely sure.

“I showed it to my cousin and we were trying to figure out what church this was. There's no church like this in St George,” she says pointing to the bell tower.

“My cousin says because it has that architectural structure, it might have been the Catholic church, but my grandmother wasn't a Catholic,” she said.

“It was just so striking, the facial features. I thought that was just a bit too much of a stretch – I can't have both of them in the exhibition!”

Bermuda House by Rupert Lovejoy, however, the family all agree is of their grandfather William Probin Francis’s shop in St George’s.

“He was a cobbler and this is him,” says Ms Minors, pointing to the figure in the foreground. “The size of the person made me think that it was my grandfather because he was of shorter stature.”

After checking dates, she concluded it might well be him. “My grandfather was born in Bermuda in 1905 so he would have been around 20 years of age, based on the date of the painting.” Although, she added: “It was less the person, but more the building that stuck out.

“When I saw it, it was this part right here that sold it for me,” she said, gesturing to the right-hand side of the building, “because that right there is the incline. You’ve got the windows, and it's a bit different and the artist changed this and that, but everything else was kind of clued in.”

The shop was set up by her great grandfather Richard Francis after he came to Bermuda from St Kitts at the turn of the 20th century. It was later passed down to his only son, William Probyn Francis, Ms Minors’s grandfather, who ran it until the mid-1980s.

“Nowadays there is no sidewalk in front of it,” she says. “But then when you think about it way back then maybe you had a need for it, if you had a cobblestone and you had a horse and carriage going through. I wouldn't be surprised that this was actually the case then.

“The colouring definitely is different. I don't know what the colour may have been way back then. Right now, it's white with the yellow trim. It's had multiple paintings, but it jumped out at me, especially when I learnt that it was St George's.

“I sent pictures to my cousin. I said, what do you think? He says, yep. He says he thinks that back then they probably did have cobblestones and the sidewalk and now clearly, they've cleared that up. He said maybe he took artistic licence and put the roof on it to make it more attractive as a picture,” Ms Minors explained.

Allen Van Putten, the eldest of the grandchildren, remembers the shop well. “In the window he had two pairs of shoes – upside-down half-sole and whole sole and then a polished pair,” he said.

“When you went into the shop and you went to the southern end there was the high chair where he did shoe shinning, which I had the opportunity to do. You went in and sat on this big thing – it had the shoes; it had the drawers, and everything.

“On the northern side, where he had the counter, he used to sit on a little stump stool and fix the shoes. Behind him was shelving full of all these shoes, and shoes all around him. His policy was if you didn’t pick up your shoes in 30 days then he would sell them to get his price back, but it would take him 60 days to fix them!”

News of the discovery travelled as far as California where Tanya Johnson, another of Richard Francis’s grandchildren now lives. She was also struck by the painting.

“I can remember as long as I was little it being a shoe shop,” Ms Johnson said. “Grandpa also used to sell soda pops and little candies. He had that glass counter where he would have goodies underneath there.

“He would always sit on a stool, with a cigar in his mouth and his hat tipped to the side, fixing shoes.

“At the far end it was the large machine that would do all the buffing. I remember that clearly. I spent hours in that shop with my dad and my grandpa.”