Is it a fake or could it be a load of old Pollocks?

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After sitting in her trailer and laughing at the paint-spattered canvas with a friend, the 74-year-old retired lorry driver from California put the painting into storage.

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It wasn't until she offered it for sale to an art-professor friend a few months later that she found out the painting could be by famous American artist Jackson Pollock and worth more than US$100 million (£79 million)- a far cry from her US$5 acquisition.

Now Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal art restorer, says he's matched a fingerprint on Horton's painting to fingerprints from a paint can found in Pollock's studio in East Hampton, New York and from a Pollock painting in a London gallery, the Toronto Star reported.

But not everyone is so sure of the work's authenticity - the International Foundation for Art Research denies the painting is an authentic Pollock, and art expert Thomas Hoving thinks it was done as a joke.

"I think somebody had a lovely house in some sunny part of the world, Palm Beach or something like that and wanted an abstract painting, maybe like a Pollock, in colours that would have fit the room," said Hoving, former director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Biro told the Toronto Star, "I think it's strong enough to go to court with," adding he learned the fingerprinting trade in private study with a police expert in the field, who also reviewed his work in this case.

Pollock died in a car crash in 1956.