A brush with Churchill?

ACK in 2022, a bloke called Barry bought a painting at a Sussex antiques fair. And jolly pretty it was too. Dating back to 1916, it depicted a garden at Herstmonceux Castle, with a lady perched on a wall, engrossed in some book or other. Barry paid £140 for it.

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On tonight's FAKE OR FORTUNE? (BBC1, 9pm), the first in the new series, he's hoping to hear it's worth a bit more. And naturally, we're all rooting for him. “Congratulations, Barry!” we want to hear the art experts telling him at the end of the programme, once they've examined this piece more closely and weighed up all the evidence.

“Your painting is worth £148.75. You must be over the moon.”

Or maybe, just maybe, it might be valued even more highly than that, because there's something else about this painting that makes it potentially special. On the back, as Barry found later when he removed the frame, someone has written the following: