£2,090 painting proved to be lost Helen McNicoll work, sold for £174,000

An English artist and part-time art dealer who bought a wrongly labelled oil painting for £2,090 at a regional UK auction made a life-changing discovery when experts confirmed that the painting was a long-lost Impressionist masterpiece. The artwork had originally been listed only as "in the style of" Canadian Impressionist Helen McNicoll and was later valued by specialists at £300,000. It was eventually sold at auction for £174,000 to Canadian collector Pierre Lassonde, bringing the painting back into public view after more than a century. David Taylor bought the painting at an auction where it was kept in a cheap plastic 1960s frame. It also had a brass-coloured plaque with the title Women of the Fields. The plaque misspelled the artist's name as "McNicol" and said the painting was made in 1958, more than 40 years after McNicoll died in 1915.