Fake £100k painting may go up in smoke

An art-loving businessman faces the prospect of seeing one of his treasured paintings thrown into a furnace after it featured on a BBC show about fakes and forgeries.

Martin Lang, a property developer from Leeds, bought what he thought was an original work by Russian-born artist Marc Chagall in 1992 for £100,000 (€121,880) and more than 20 years later his son called in experts from BBC1’s Fake Or Fortune to examine it.

Viewers of last night’s show saw the watercolour, a nude said to date from 1909-10, undergo a series of tests in a bid to prove if it was genuine before it was sent to the Chagall Committee in Paris.