£500,000 of Art Arrives at National Galleries of Scotland After 10-Year Delay

EDINBURGH—Six oil paintings and more than 50 watercolors and drawings by 19th-century painter David Roberts, worth approximately £500,000, have finally arrived at the National Galleries of Scotland, ten years after the donation was delayed due to a forged will, The Herald (Glasgow) reports.   

The works belonged to collector Helen Guiterman, whose painstaking research into the career of Roberts, a well-known artist during his lifetime, rescued him from late 20th-century obscurity.  

Before her death in 1998, Guiterman had arranged for the artworks to go to the Scottish museum through the Art Fund, the U.K. art charity, but Shaun Gray, the grandson of her cousin, claimed to be her executor and said that Guiterman had changed her will. The case was unresolved until 2006, when Gray was arrested and convicted of false accounting and forgery, including forging the will to entitle himself to the estate and the Roberts artworks.

John Leighton, the director-general of the National Galleries, said: "We are particularly grateful to the Art Fund for all its efforts to ensure that Ms. Guiterman's wishes were fulfilled. The Art Fund has displayed extraordinary generosity in its support for public collections across Scotland over many years."

Some of the drawings from the Guiterman bequest will be included in the exhibition "Imagining Spain: From Goya to Picasso, The British and Spain," which opens July 18.

Guiterman became interested in Roberts after she bought two works purportedly by him in the early 1960s. During the next 30 years, she did extensive research on the artist, tracking down his descendants, journals, and letters, and hundreds of artworks. She selected and cataloged exhibitions of Roberts’s work in 1967, 1981, and 1986, the latter a retrospective of his career at the Barbican Gallery.