Ernest Onians made an unlikely fine art collector. He toured East Anglia in a scruffy Austin Maxi looking for Old Masters to snap up using a fortune made from pigswill.
But his eye for a bargain proved keener than the assembled experts of Sotheby's, who - while selling off his estate after his death at the age of 90 in January 1995 - managed to miss one of the greatest artistic finds of the past 20 years.
This week Sotheby's gave his family a settlement of up to £2 million ($6.8 million), bringing to an end a five-year battle over the identity of a picture initially valued at a few thousand pounds but later sold for £4.5 million.
The auction house originally identified the dirt-encrusted painting - which Onians had bought for £12 at a country house auction in the 1940s and stored in a chicken shed - as The Sack of Carthage by the minor artist Pietro Testa.
Sotheby's estimated its worth at £15,000. Leading art historian Sir Denis Mahon became suspicious about its true provenance and told the London gallery Hazlitt Gooden & Fox to acquire it at any cost. It sold for £155,000.
Two years later the new owners proved it was a work by the 17th-century master Nicolas Poussin, which had been lost since 1633 only a short time after it was presented to Cardinal Richelieu.
Cleaned up and restored, The Destruction and Sack of the Temple of Jerusalem, as it should have been known, was sold in 1998 to the philanthropist Sir Jacob Rothschild and the Rothschild Foundation for £4.5 million. It was given to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where it now hangs.
Onians' family, understandably dismayed, demanded compensation.
His nephew John, a professor of art history at the University of East Anglia, said that the out-of-court settlement would have delighted his uncle, who kept the painting for 50 years at the dilapidated water mill where he lived in Suffolk.
It was one of a collection of more than 1000 artefacts - including clocks, furniture, wine and about 500 Old Masters - that was sold for £1.2 million after Onians' death.
There were so many objects that he did not have room to store them properly. Instead, he kept them jumbled around his home, where they collected dust.
His nephew said: "To the untrained eye his collection could easily have looked like piles of old rubbish in shabby and dirty rooms.
"He hoarded so many things that he simply did not have the space to keep them and they overflowed out of rooms and his sheds outside.
"Some things were 50 deep in rooms. Paintings were leant against each other like playing cards, and grandfather clocks were marshalled like soldiers. He never had his works of art valued when he was alive, so nobody had any real idea how much they were worth."
The collection was built up after the Second World War, when Onians set about investing the fortune he amassed through selling the Tottenham Pudding, a pig feed mixture made up of leftover food collected from Tottenham Council kitchens during the war.
Nicknamed the Pudding King by Suffolk farmers, Onians was introduced to the London art world by his wife, Daphne, a former model, and he began searching out bargains around East Anglia.
Although he did not spend any time looking after the artworks he bought, in some cases - as with the Poussin - the thick layer of dirt that built up helped to protect the painting from decay.
Whether Onians realised the worth of his find will never be known. It was finished in Rome in 1626 for Cardinal Francesco Barberini, who gave it to Cardinal Richelieu in 1633. It passed through various French collections before vanishing from records at the start of the 18th century.
Although Sotheby's guide price gave no hint of the work's importance, two galleries - Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox and Anthony Mould - believed Lot 49 had hidden depths. They bid against each other until Anthony Mould pulled out at 10 times its estimated price.
After the sale, the painting was restored in a two-year operation. Sir Dennis Mahon and Pierre Rosenberg, director of the Louvre in Paris, ruled it was indeed the Poussin, finding it matched 17th-century descriptions of the painting.
Sotheby's refused to comment on the settlement , but the firm is believed to have insurance to cover such cases of mistaken identity.
A spokeswoman for the auction house said only: "I can confirm we have settled this case, but the terms of the agreement are completely confidential."
- INDEPENDENT
How Sotheby's missed the bargain of a lifetime
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