Beaverbrook Art Battle Result

New Brunswick's Beaverbrook Art Gallery has won an important decision in a bitter, four-year legal dispute over Canada’s finest collection of English masterpiece paintings, reports CanWest News Service. The Fredericton art gallery has been declared the owner of almost $100-million worth of art works that were first donated to the gallery by its founder Max Aitken — the Canadian-born, English newspaper tycoon better known as Lord Beaverbrook — before his death in 1964. Beaverbrook's grandsons — including the current Lord Beaverbrook, Max Aitken III — and their family have been waging a highly public legal battle with the gallery over the ownership of 211 art works, including two of the gallery's most famous paintings, Fountain of Indolence by J.M.W. Turner and Hotel Bedroom by Lucian Freud, together worth an estimated $30-million. About 130 of the disputed art were the subject of an arbitration hearing last fall, heard by retired Supreme Court of Canada justice Peter Cory. On Monday, Cory decided largely in favour of the gallery, ruling the original Lord Beaverbrook had given most of the disputed art to the gallery as gifts, not as loans as argued by Beaverbrook's heirs. For decades, gallery executives acquiesced when Beaverbrook's heirs came looking for valuable art work to sell. Several important paintings, including a Thomas Gainsborough, were taken from the gallery's collection and sold by the family in the 1970s. In 2003, when the family asked for the Turner and the Freud, the gallery said no. Soon lawsuits were filed by both sides and an international court battle was underway. (For full source and article click the Headline). Irish Art