Italian police have recovered two paintings worth at least €10.6 million (£8.8 million), which they found hanging on the kitchen wall of a former factory worker in Turin.
Paul Gauguin’s Fruits sur une table ou nature au petit chien (Fruits on a table or still life with a small dog) and Pierre Bonnard’s La femme aux deux fauteuils (Woman with two armchairs) were stolen from a London collector’s home in 1970.
The paintings were anonymously left on a train in 1975, and were put up for a lost property auction where an unsuspecting art-loving Fiat factory worker bought them for 45,000 Lire (£19).
He hung the paintings in his home in Turin, before retiring to Sicily where they were hung in his kitchen.
The unnamed man contacted consultants about the paintings after his son noticed similarities between one of them and a Gauguin in an art history book, and police were alerted to their location.
