AN OLD MASTER

WHEN Canon Jamie MacLeod happened upon what looked like an Anthony van Dyck (one of the most famous Flemish painters of the 17th century) in a Cheshire antique shop in 1992, he assumed it was a fake.

But he liked it so much that he bought it anyway — for £400 — and hung it on his sitting-room wall.

Which is where it stayed, until 2014, when he took it along to the Roadshow at Newstead Abbey near Nottingham and presenter Fiona Bruce, who just happened to have made a documentary about Van Dyck, spotted something in the brushstrokes that made her think it was the real thing.

She was right. Art expert Philip Mould declared it a masterpiece and valued it at £400,000, the most valuable painting identified in the show’s history.

A delighted Canon MacLeod told the programme he’d sell it to pay for new church bells for his Derbyshire church.

Sadly, though, his congregation are still waiting, because when it came up for auction following restoration later that year, it failed to meet its reserve.