The story
From 2004 the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, spent six years fighting a British charity over who owned its best paintings. The Beaverbrook UK Foundation argued that 133 works had only been lent by the gallery's founder, Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian-raised press baron who built the Daily Express in London. Among them were J. M. W. Turner's Fountain of Indolence and Lucian Freud's Hotel Bedroom. A retired Supreme Court justice ruled in 2007 that 85 of them, Turner and Freud included, belonged to the gallery, and an appeal panel upheld the decision.
Beaverbrook, who grew up in Newcastle, New Brunswick, opened the gallery in 1959 on the bank of the Saint John River, across the street from the provincial legislature, and filled it largely with British art he had chosen himself. Visitors still meet Sir Joshua Reynolds's portrait of Mrs Thrale and her daughter Hester, and Delacroix's Lady Macbeth Sleepwalking.
The picture most people come for is Salvador Dalí's Santiago El Grande, a canvas about four metres tall that shows Saint James, patron saint of Spain, on a rearing white horse. Dalí painted it for the Spanish pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, and it was given to the gallery by Lady Dunn, widow of the New Brunswick-born financier Sir James Dunn, who later married Lord Beaverbrook himself.
