Owner drops by after 14 years to pick up lavish collection of forgotten art

Forgetting to pick up your suit from the dry-cleaners is easily done. Forgetting to pick up your collection of 64 valuable 19th-century Indian paintings from a museum is another matter.

That is exactly what happened to a British man who took his collection to the British Museum’s free object identification service - only to forget to collect it for 14 years.



The museum tried repeatedly to contact the man about his important collection of lavishly detailed paintings of Hindu deities of the Tamil country, created in India around 1820 for British patrons.

Richard Blurton, the museum’s curator in the Asia department, made attempts to find the owner, but there was no word from him until a few months ago when he casually appeared again, saying that he had come to collect his paintings. He was astonished to learn of their significance and is now £70,000 richer because the museum has bought them. “They’re beautifully drawn and the colour is astonishingly sumptuous. There’s a great use of gold paint, which is rare because it’s expensive,” Mr Blurton said.

They feature in an exhibition titled Faith, Narrative and Desire: Masterpieces of Indian Painting in the British Museum, until November 11.