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A giant masterpiece that was damaged in the Blitz has been rediscovered after nearly 70 years and is to go on show at the National Gallery.
The painting - Charles I Insulted By Cromwell's Soldiers, by French artist Paul Delaroche - was in the dining room of Bridgewater House in St James's, then home of the Scottish Ellesmere family, when the building was bombed.
The painting received extensive shrapnel damage and was immediately removed from its stretcher and paper laid over the larger tears. It was then rolled up and evacuated to Merton, the family's country house in the Scottish borders, where it has been kept for almost 70 years, but forgotten by the world at large.
It was rediscovered this year when the National Gallery set out to verify claims it had been destroyed in the war and asked the Duke of Sutherland, owner of Merton by a different line of the family, if he still had it. The family, which recently sold Titian's Diana And Actaeon to the National Gallery and its counterpart in Scotland, has an extensive art collection.
The work, which is 2.92 metres by 2.84 metres, was unrolled in June and its condition has since been stabilised and tears repaired.
Nicholas Penny, the National Gallery's artistic director, said it was an important find. "Delaroche is one of the great painters of the 19th century. It's a major discovery to find a picture like that," he said. "The moral of all this is when you find a painting is described as being destroyed, often you find it means that someone has assumed it is."
It will go on show in February alongside the gallery's exhibition Painting History - Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey. The show, from 24 February to 23 May, will focus on The Execution Of Lady Jane Grey by Delaroche, which was itself wrongly thought lost in a 1928 flood before being found in 1973.
