Stolen art found at boot sale

THE mysterious disappearance of a £30 000 (R539 000) oil painting by the artist son of actress Joan Collins took a strange twist after it turned up in a car boot sale.

The valuable work was snapped up for just £40 after the seller was persuaded to knock £20 off its asking price.

Alexander “Sacha” Newley’s picture had gone missing en route to the home of multimillionaire entrepreneur and former London mayoral candidate Ivan Massow last year. But it has now been reunited with its owner after gardener Lee Broadway bought it at a car boot fair on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, England, from “a normal bloke selling the usual rubbish out of a very average car”.

The piece, entitled The Cardplayers (Seven Deadly Sins), depicts a group of unsavoury characters, each representing a different vice, around a gambling table. It went missing alongside two self-portraits somewhere between Newley’s New York apartment and Massow’s Sussex mansion. Newley, who had spent three years perfecting the picture, said he was “deeply indebted to Lee, I really am .A less moral person might have tried to profit from it.”

But Broadway said, when he discovered it was stolen and reported it to police, he found himself embroiled in the investigation, with officers taking his DNA and fingerprints. “If I had known the trouble it would cause me, I would have taken it into the garden and burnt it.”