Auction painting ID'ed as Gainsborough

LONDON, June 28 (UPI) -- A British television show art expert identified a painting put up for sale for $25,000 as a Thomas Gainsborough original worth $1.2 million, observers say.

Philip Mould, who values fine artwork for the BBC1 television program "Antiques Roadshow," pieced together several clues to identify the landscape painting on auction at Sotheby's as a lost painting by one of Britain's greatest 18th-century masters, The Sunday Times of London reported.

"As soon as I saw an online image from the sales catalog, I thought it might be Gainsborough," Mould told the newspaper. "It was the way the light was painted, and the sandy ground in the foreground, which are trademarks of Gainsborough. But we needed to do some rapid sleuthing before the sale a few weeks later."

Mould said one of the most telling clues was that the building depicted in the painting was from Ipswich, England, which in the 1740s was a mere village, The Sunday Times reported.

Also, a couple at the front of the canvas looked similar to a Gainsborough drawing of himself and his wife held by the Louvre in Paris, Mould said.