Rare Fra Angelico paintings found in spare room!

As a great lover of Fra Angelico's work, this news pleased me:

Jean Preston liked the paintings when she came across them in California in the 1960s and got her art collector dad to buy them for a few hundred pounds - so she could "indulge her interest in curious works", The Independent reports.

Little did she know, the works by the Italian Renaissance master had been missing for 200 years.

Painted in the 1430s, they were part of a magnificent altarpiece in Florence and believed to have been lost or destroyed during the Napoleonic wars, nearly 400 years after their creation.

One of her relatives told The Independent:

"Jean bought the paintings because she thought they were rather nice. Someone came in with a box of things they wanted to get rid of. None wanted them but she was a medievalist and actually thought that they were quite nice. When I used to stay with her I slept on a sofa bed underneath the paintings. Who would have thought she had the equivalent of a winning lottery ticket in her spare room all these years?"

But really, so much more than a lotto ticket!

Anyway, CNA reports that they are going up for auction in England and are expected to sell for over £1 million.